We have been using a range of analytical techniques, and in particular NMR spectroscopy and mass spectrometry, to follow metabolism in the brain in a range of disease processes. This ranges from flux measurements to understand the cycling of metabolites between neuronal and glial cells and how this process is influenced by drug intervention to the development of pattern recognition tools to identify metabolic profiles associated with a given disease process. The majority of work has centered on mouse models of disease and in particular we have examined models of Alzheimer?s disease, Parkinson's disease and the Neuronal Ceroid Lipofuscinoses. This has also been augmented by cell culture and human post mortem tissue work. These approaches are high throughput and provide a rapid mechanism to screen for metabolic perturbations within brain tissue. We also have an interest in developing new bioinformatic tools for examining multivariate data.
