Dr Adam Dobson; University of Glasgow
Adam Dobson is a UKRI Future Leaders Fellow at the School of Molecular Biosciences, University of Glasgow. He studied for his BSc and PhD at the University of Sheffield, followed by postdoctoral work at Cornell University and UCL, before establishing his independent lab in 2019. The group studies metabolism and ageing; through a combination of genetic, 'omic, physiological and quantitative techniques. Adam is interested overall in how we can optimise health states by proactively tuning the major drivers of biological variation, which currently manifests in work on nutrition, hormones, and mitochondrial genetics.
Metabolism is the hub of cellular life, integrating genetics with extrinsic factors and internal state, to determine emergent phenotype. Characterising metabolism systematically can therefore reveal novel biology and mechanisms, and can provide a basis for predictive biology. In our lab we apply this framework to understand mechanisms of lifelong health, using a reductionist Drosophila model to study conserved principles. We are particularly interested in gut microbiota, because eukaryotes inherited the rules of metabolism when they evolved from the primordial microbiome, which has left abundant interfaces for microbes to modulate host animal metabolism directly. We are finding how specific bacteria reshape host metabolic networks – promoting energy use and manipulating the host to nourish the microbiota reciprocally – and modulate ageing and behaviour via the gut-brain axis. We are also interested in computing metabolic states, as a means to barcode emergent biological variation: we have proof-of-concept that we can predict how individuals will likely respond to interventions before they are applied, with possible applications in healthcare.
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