Lee Sweetlove is Professor of Plant Sciences at the University of Oxford. He leads a research group seeking to develop a better understanding of the behaviour of the metabolic systems of plants in order to devise metabolic engineering strategies that will improve the productivity and quality of crop plants. The main approach used to generate that understanding is computational modelling which allows fluxes through the set of interconnected reactions of the metabolic network to be predicted and analysed. Computational models are used to predict metabolic flux distributions at the single cell level, tissue-level and whole-plant-level. Integration of large datasets helps constrain and weight the models towards biologically accurate formulations and aids in the identification of metabolic inefficiencies and bottlenecks, allowing metabolic engineering strategies to be explored in silico.

Edward Smith is a Postdoctoral Researcher in the group of Lee Sweetlove in Department of Biology at the University of Oxford, UK. He is interested in understanding plant metabolism and how it can be engineered to produce plants with desirable traits. Within the CASS project he is building computational models of cassava to identify genetic targets for yield improvement and to understand how modifications in different tissues can be combined for the best results.