The MAP/UK Mission

Our mission is to advance metabolic phenotyping for the benefit of UK scientists by driving cooperation, collaborative development, and education among UK research institutions. The overarching goal of the partnership is to develop, optimise, transfer, harmonise and validate efficient and high-quality research methods and training, specifically tailored to application in molecular epidemiology, clinical medicine, and understanding disease mechanisms, to meet the growing need of biomedical studies that require metabolic phenotyping.

Specifically, we aim to:

1. Improve UK-wide phenotyping capability in a manner that leverages the strengths, proficiencies, and experience of leading UK research groups, providing access to a harmonised cross-institution suite of technologies, methods, and best practices that function as a single platform for accelerated phenotyping research.

2. Improve the quality of phenomics training available to UK-researchers, providing an unmatched national resource for the training of technologists, bioinformaticians, and clinical/epidemiological collaborators.

3. Enhance the quality of phenomics research by promoting the best practices of all consortium members, and facilitating the further development and implementation of novel analytical methods, bioinformatic tools, and databases for disease characterization, population stratification and enhanced biomarker recovery.

4. Improve the UK's capacity for phenomics research by harmonising data generated by individual studies, allowing aggregation of data from geographically dispersed populations, and enabling the partnership to tackle the analysis of populations of unprecedented size.

5. Deliver UK-wide efficiency in the development of a harmonised phenomics platform by coordinating and aligning efforts toward the establishment and validation of targeted and untargeted spectroscopic tools and analytical pipelines for broad metabolome screening and deep phenome exploration, minimising redundancy and parallel development thereby ensuring maximal return from UK investments.

6. Provide case studies to demonstrate to the academic and clinical leaders the feasibility and impact of academic-led metabolic phenotyping in epidemiological studies