MATHEMATICAL MODELING IN NUTRITION

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DESCRIPTION: A healthful diet is important for growth, development, reproduction and disease prevention. Since it optimizes the dynamics of nutrient metabolism, nutritionists are beginning to focus on mathematical modeling of kinetic data to understand the dynamics of nutrient metabolism in vivo. Availability of suitably tagged (stable isotope) nutrients, sensitive analytical methods (mass spectrometry) and computers capable of solving (and manipulating) differential equations efficiently and accurately now allow the dynamics of nutrient metabolism in vivo to be mathematically simulated. Also, differences in the dynamics of nutrient metabolism between individuals can now be quantified. Therefore, the overall conference objective is to encourage increased collaboration among physical scientists, mathematicians, biologists and nutritionists in addressing nutrition research problems in an environment where predoctoral and postdoctoral fellows, beginning and established investigators (wanting to incorporate mathematical modeling into the research armamentarium) and research administrators to interact and learn of the possibilities that mathematical modeling has to offer biological and physical scientists. The four day conference will be devoted to the background and theoretical aspects of physiologic compartmental modeling with examples from a variety of key nutrients and physiologic states. The final session of the conference will focus on recent developments in the analysis of tagged nutrients in biological tissues using state of the art methods such as mass spectrometry, accelerator mass spectrometry and hyphenated techniques such as HPLC-MS and GC-MS. Major focus will be on the SAAM programs. They can run on a PC (386 or higher) and have a capacity of 75 pools and 1,000 data points and are supported by Dr. Loren Zech in the Laboratory of Mathematical Biology at the National Cancer Institute. A Windows-based and a Macintosh-based version of SAAM, namely SAAM II, has been developed at the Resource Facility for Kinetic Analysis of the University of Washington and will also be available at the conference for use/discussion/evaluation. The conference will be oriented toward beginners but advanced users can demonstrate the new refinements and full capabilities of SAAM. State of the art computer hardware facilities will be available during the conference to allow participants to process their own data. Throughout the conference experienced users will work with the beginners at the computers.