Nicolas’s master thesis
defence
Last week a member of our group held his master thesis defence. The
member in question was Nicolas who has been doing in his master thesis in our
group, as well as some work prior to that.
Nicolas hold a well-structured and informative presentation of his work
and defended his thesis in a great way.
Nicolas project aimed to characterize the metabolic fluxes of carbon-13
labelled metabolites throughout parts of the metabolic system. The fluxes were
determined from the structure of the metabolites in the end of the metabolic
system. By knowing the reactions in the system and the number of intermediate
products from the inserted labelled metabolites, one can determent the fluxes
between the reactions. This method is called metabolic flux analysis. Although
this is to hard math to do by hand, one can use mathematical modelling.
The second part of Nicolas project was to validate that his model could accurately
predict the quantities of the metabolic fluxes. However, today, there is no
established method for this kind of validation. Nicolas validated his model by the
model’s ability to predict a validation dataset, data that the model have not
seen before. By using this approach, one wish to see how the model react to new
data and judge the model quality by how true the model’s prediction of this
data is.
Additionally, the uncertainty of the predictions was analysed with a
profile likelihood analysis. With such predictions, one can place more trust in
fluxes determined by the model. Consequently, this allows for more challenging
issues to be tackled in the development process of new treatments.
With this we want to congratulate Nicolas on his completed master thesis
and wish good luck in the future.
