Ng, Zui Keat Oral Presentation Winner for COSM
College of Science and Mathematics
Professor: Dr. Saul Trevino
ABSTRACT:
C-reactive protein (CRP) is known as a marker of inflammatory bowel diseae such as Crohn’s disease and coronary heart disease (Yasojima et. al., 2001), and it acts as an opsonin and activates the removal of pathogen from the organisms (Mold C. et. al., 2002). However, researchers are unsure of the role that CRP plays in inflammation, in other words, researchers are uncertain about whether or not if CRP is just a marker for inflammatory diseases or a disease causing agent. For example, a recent study discovered centenarians to be healthier compared to elderly people even though their serum CRP levels were higher (Montoliu et al., 2014). Another study suggested that CRP may play a direct role in inflammatory diseases, but the authors had some interesting results where CRP play an inflammatory role in the presence of human serum but not in the absence of human serum (Pasceri, 2000). The researchers proposed the question of what component or components of human serum are required for the inflammatory effect of CRP. Therefore, the specific aim of this proposed research is to use NMR metabolomics and shotgun lipidomics to investigate the components of human serum and their possible associations with CRP in the inflammatory process. Using these methods, we would expect to find the components in human serum that along with CRP promote inflammation. Hopefully, this proposed study would lead to a better understanding of the mechanism of the inflammatory diseases.
