[Rant]
The frustrating thing is, there is no funding for Karl. He with his collaborators have the capability to measure 30,000 metabolites in multiple cohorts. He identified "VIP" markers but needs to replicate and try to discover what they are. If we are going on a fishing excursion shouldn't this be an area that gets funding.
While I'm on a rant he identified phenylalanine as an important metabolite. As has Chris Armstrong. High levels of phenylalanine can be toxic. Shouldn't we be looking at the phenylalanine pathway to dig deeper into what is happening. We can't because Karl Mortens interesting findings have no funding for further work and for replication of the work he has done. And we don't know if Glutamate is important unless he can replicate in different cohorts to make sure it is not an anomoly of the collection/preparation process. I just don't understand why the UK has not funded his work when it did fund another fishing project - GWAS. The purpose is the same - look at a large number of things in a large population and see what shakes out.
What I'm saying is we are left to speculate. Such as the purpose of this thread.
[/Rant]
By the way Karl, in correspondence, highlighted that he fully supported the decision to fund GWAS. I won't be able to do it justice but when you don't know the cause of a disease then you can use techniques like GWAS to find clues --- I sort of think of it as scoring everything and then interpreting the results to see the clues which turn up.
I liked Hanson's recent [aptamer-based proteomics] paper* but I wonder if there's something in the 4 million odd (?) proteins we are missing. Again your trying to test for everything and seeing what turns up.
I'm hoping there will be Horizon Europe funding available - perhaps something for Karl to consider; UK participates in the (EU) Horizon Europe program.
*https://www.mdpi.com/2227-7382/9/1/6