To optimise and exploit technology that allows the measurement of the metabolome of human serum, its normal ranges and variation using a range of complementary techniques:

• Gas Chromatography coupled to Mass Spectrometry (GC-MS)
• Liquid Chromatography coupled to Mass Spectrometry (LC-MS)
• Accurate mass measurement to identify unknown metabolites using Mass Spectrometry
• FTIR
• NMR

Characterise the "normal" human serum metabolome and establish:

• Typical metabolites and their ranges observed for each technology
• The disease-independent changes that occur as a function of diet, gender, age, therapeutic interventions and lifestyle

To study the metabolome of "diseased" patients to:

• Identify prognostic and diagnostic biomarkers for disease
• Determine the efficacy of drugs and other treatments

Through these studies we aim to:

• Discover novel metabolites
• Provide a web based resource to the scientific community, exploiting emerging metabolome data and accompanying metadata
• To learn of, develop and validate relationships for data visualisation, mining and exploitation of genetic programming

Recruitment of volunteers for the characterisation of the "normal" human serum metabolome is currently being conducted with the assistance of:

• European Male Ageing Study (EMAS)
• GlaxoSmithKline
• Stockport PCT