Nevan Krogan
University of California San Francisco, San Francisco, California, USA

From Systems to Structure: Bridging Networks and Mechanism

 To be added

Dr. Andrew Emili
University of Toronto, Toronto, ON

Andrew Emili is a Professor in the Banting and Best Department of Medical Research at the University of Toronto. He is also affiliated with the Terrence Donnelly Centre for Cellular and Biomolecular Research (the Donnelly Centre) and the Department of Molecular Genetics.

Dr. Emili received a PhD from the University of Toronto in 1997 in Molecular and Medical Genetics.  From 1997 to 2000, he pursued post-doctoral studies in the Division of Human Biology with the Nobel laureate Dr. Leland Hartwell at the Fred Hutchison Cancer Research Center in Seattle.

Since establishing his Toronto laboratory in 2000, Dr. Emili has developed and applied advanced proteomic, functional genomic and bioinformatic methods to investigate the biological roles and molecular associations of the different proteins and genes expressed in a typical organism or cell.  His research team has outstanding skills in state-of-the-art experimental techniques for both identifying and investigating the biological functions of proteins in an unbiased, high-throughput and genome-wide manner.  His group aims to contribute breakthrough mechanistic insights into how cells and tissues function at the molecular level, and to translate this basic knowledge to enhance the clinical application of protein biomarkers as novel diagnostic and therapeutic targets.

'Systems' Biology: Mapping Molecular Interaction Networks in E. coli

Few bacteria rival E. coli with respect to the amount of biological knowledge, yet we are far from understanding the biological roles and functional relationships of all its gene products from a global ‘systems’ perspective. Our long-term research objective is to elucidate a more complete description of the molecular architecture of E. coli using complementary experimental and computational methods.    Using efficient affinity-purification/mass spectrometry procedures, we have derived extensive high-quality ‘maps’ of physical protein-protein interactions and stable multiprotein complexes in E. coli.      We have also developed high-throughput E. coli Synthetic Genetic Array (eSGA) technology to systematically map genetic (gene-gene) interactions on a large scale.  Knowledge of these fundamental functional association networks provides mechanistic insights into the operation of core microbial processes that are essential to bacterial cell homeostasis, growth, proliferation and adaptation.