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Welcome to CCSB Introduction The long-term goal of CCSB is to understand how macromolecular networks control biological processes and how perturbations in such networks can lead to phenotypes and human disease.
Physical protein-protein interactions are crucial for most biological processes. In this context, we address the following fundamental questions: How are protein interactions organized at the scale of the whole cell? Are there global principles that organize such complex networks of interactions? How can we begin to understand global topological features of networks? And importantly, could it be that such organizational principles are disrupted in human disease?
Initially, we focused on the multi-cellular model organism Caenorhabditis elegans, and more recently we have expanded our efforts to the yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae, the plant Arabidopsis thaliana, and human. To determine how proteins function in complex cellular networks, we have been mapping and characterizing protein-protein interactions in a systematic manner, an approach referred to as “interactome” modeling (Vidal in: The yeast two-hybrid system 1997; Walhout et al Am J Hum Genet 1998; Vidal Cell 2001; Ge et al Trends Genet 2003; Vidal FEBS Lett 2005). CCSB has grown out of the Vidal lab and by now consists of several independent research groups working closely together to study network biology. (More) |
The Network Biology group (Vidal lab) studies how network properties relate to biology and disease using experimental and theoretical approaches.
The Interactome group uses and develops high-throughput technologies to map protein-protein interaction networks of H. sapiens and model organisims.
The ORFeome group experimentally defines open reading frames (ORFs) and splice isoforms for H. sapiens and model organisms by isolating and cloning them.
This group investigates how proteins of pathogens interact and perturb the host interactomes. This project is part of a Center of Excellence in Genomic Sciences (CEGS) grant in which eight groups collaborate to.