I am a Fellow at Keble College and a College Lecturer at University College.This was one of those stories that was hard to put down until I finished it! The beginning chapter just grabs you and you keep reading to see what will happen in the life of Amy Maxwell and her precious and adorable daughter, Pyper.

I am a cardiothoracic intensive care physician at the John Radcliffe hospital. I teach metabolism to biomedical science, medicine and biochemistry undergraduates. My research is funded by the British Heart Foundation and Wellcome Trust.

heart failure, ventricular unloading) influence triacylglycerol substrate utilisation. We are also examining how tissue-specific factors (e.g. Relating changes in structural motifs in VLDL to specific substrate signalling function is a fundamental aim of these studies. Besides having obvious clinical relevance, this work also demonstrated the ability of VLDL to signal target tissues, influencing metabolic status, a phenomenon we are now investigating further. We have demonstrated the capacity of the heart to utilise triacylglycerol from different lipoprotein sources and defined myocardial substrate preference, but also demonstrated how this selection depends on structural variation in the TG-rich lipoprotein presented, resulting in substrate “switching” in disease states (diabetes, sepsis). diabetic-variant VLDL) can be generated and tested. This technique has the great advantage that structurally variant species of VLDL characteristic of underlying disease (e.g. The key to my work has been our development of a technique of liver perfusion in order to generate species-specific VLDL. My early research work concentrated on metabolic interplay between tissues during cancer cachexia subsequently I examined lipid substrate selection and preference by key peripheral tissues such as heart and immune cells. Previously, I undertook my D.Phil in the Metabolic Research Laboratory, Radcliffe Infirmary, supervised by Dr Derek (Dermot) Williamson, and was subsequently a Lecturer in the Nuffield Department of Anaesthetics. I joined DPAG in 2009 as a Reader and group leader in Metabolism. This work further investigates novel putative mechanisms of VLDL as a metabolic signal in health and disease. My research focusses on the role of lipids, and in particular, triacylglycerol-rich lipoproteins such as very-low-density lipoprotein (VLDL), in substrate provision and metabolic signalling, in oxidative tissues such as the heart.

Hearts Key by Marianne Evans