Cellular and Molecular Nutrition Theme Blog

Welcome to the Cellular and Molecular Theme Blog! This first edition briefly addresses my goals going into the role of Theme Leader, I suspect I will look back in due course and cringe at the naiveté!

As Theme Leader, I look forward to ‘spreading the word’ about the value of cellular and molecular approaches to the study of nutrition, about the limitations of such approaches and the need to take an integrative view, and about emerging strategies and technologies and their potential impact upon nutritional research. Much more important still is to hear how other researchers from across the discipline address the challenge of determining mechanisms of action of their favourite molecules. I am a strong believer in integrated approaches, my group uses in vitro models, classical cell biology as well as high-throughput and ‘omic approaches to our research. The extension of this is the emergent field of Systems Biology and I strongly believe and have experienced that systems-type approaches have the potential to offer novel and emergent insights into biology.

I have been impressed by the great response to calls for membership of the Theme Team. We now have 12 members, a great spread of interest and skills, and are developing plans for theme activities in 2013 and beyond. You can look at the team members’ profiles and interests on the pen portraits page. We have a nascent page of useful resources for cellular and molecular nutritionists and would like members to feed into this to continue to improve and develop it.

My goals over the coming year will be to run a workshop on the design and interpretation of data from Omics approaches with plenty of time for hands-on, tutored interrogation of attendees’ own datasets. More information will follow on this shortly. In the longer term your team has ideas for the development of workshops and meetings, but please, please do let us know what you think and whether there are areas for meetings, workshops or training that we can develop for you or in partnership.  You can contact us through the office or comment on the Blog or Forum, Facebook, and please keep an eye on the feeds on the homepage.

Bernard

Cellular and Molecular Nutrition Theme Leader