Líffræðifélag Íslands - biologia.is
Líffræðiráðstefnan 2017
Erindi/veggspjald / Talk/poster V36
Höfundar / Authors: Rósa S'olveig Sigurðardóttir
Starfsvettvangur / Affiliations: Háskóli Íslands
Kynnir / Presenter: Rósa Sólveig Sigurðardóttir
The vascular endothelium consists of endothelial cells (ECs) in a single layer and the state of the endothelium is one measure of vascular health. The endothelial glycocalyx (EGL) is an extracellular luminal structure on the vascular endothelium bound to ECs. The ability of the human endothelium to maintain a functional EGL is key to endothelial health. The disrubtion of the EGL (as measured by the presence of glycocalyx components free in the blood plasma) along with sympatho-adrenal hyper activation has been shown to be an indicator of poor prognosis in acute critical illness (ACI). ACI is a set of serious diseases including sepsis and severe trauma. A major problem for some categories of ACI is that no specific treatments exists and patient response to treatment is highly variable for reasons that remain not fully understood. In this project an EC specific genome scale metabolic model (GEM) will be updated, making it more suitable to analyse endothelial metabolism with regards to EGL maintenance. This requires coverage of the metabolic data available along with an extensive literature review. This updated GEM will be used to analyse plasma datasets from ACI patients in order to define metabolic phenotypes of ACI patients with regards to EGL metabolism. The next step will be to struct novel hypotheses of possible metabolic interventions for modifying the endothelial response to adrenal hyper activation in ACI. These hypotheses will be tested in silico through GEM analysis.