Academics at The University of Nottingham will conduct joint research with their counterparts in India after success in the biggest ever education initiative between the two countries.

They will join forces with researchers in Delhi, Kanpur and Lucknow as part of a major Government drive to strengthen links between top academics in the UK and India.

Nottingham experts are celebrating two new grants made under the UK-India Education and Research Initiative (UKIERI), an international scheme launched last year by Prime Minister Tony Blair.

The first grant, of more than 300,000, has been made to a team of researchers led by Dr David de Pomerai in the School of Biology and Professor John King in the School of Mathematical Sciences. The Nottingham team will work with Drs D Kar Chowdhuri and Daya K Saxena of the Industrial Toxicology Research Centre, Lucknow, in the northern Indian state of Uttar Pradesh, on a four-year project.

Collaborators will also include Professor Pradip Sinha at the Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur, also in Uttar Pradesh.

Their aim is to develop a mathematical model that will allow them to predict how living organisms respond when exposed to chemical pollution, particularly where a number of different pollutants are mixed together. While many individual defence mechanisms have been studied in the past, there has not yet been a systematic study of how the whole system known as the 'stress-response network' responds to chemical mixtures.

Dr de Pomerai will be working with Dr Matt Loose of the School of Biology, who will model the genetic circuitry that controls the stress-response network.

Dr de Pomerai said: "This project will achieve a step-change in our understanding of mixture toxicity, by building a predictive mathematical model of the entire stress-response network, based on experimental data from two model invertebrates nematode worms and fruit flies.

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Contact: Tim Utton
tim.utton@nottingham.ac.uk
01-158-468-092
University of Nottingham
2-Feb-2007