CBS >> Research Groups >> Integrative Systems Biology

2008-Dec-28 This week, reseachers from the Integrative Systems Biology group at CBS have created a catalogue of tissue-specific processes involved in hundreds of inherited diseases. These results could help treat diseases such as breast cancer, Parkinson disease, heart diseases and autism, and is the result of a collaboration between CBS, Massachusetts General Hospital, and Harvard Medical School. Read more here:
[English Press release] [Article in PNAS] [Pubmed]

2007-Mar-12 New research, published in this weeks issue of Nature Biotechnology, show that genes involved in the development of inherited diseases, such as Alzheimer's disease, work together in protein complexes. This knowledge has been used to predict new genes involved in hundreds of diseases such as sclerosis and type 2-diabetes. Read more here:
[Danish Press release] [Article in Nature Biotechnology] [Pubmed]

2006-Oct-5 This week, the Journal Nature publishes exciting new results from the Brunak and Bork groups which reveal that despite the fact that many of the core cell cycle protein complexes are conserved during evolution, their regulation has evolved considerably. The results are in perfect agreement with the just-in-time assembly principle that we proposed last year for yeast and even demonstrate a hitherto undescribed tendency for co-evolution of different layers of regulation. Read more here:
[Danish Press release] [Article in Nature] [Commentary in Nature] [Pubmed] [Supplementary Information]

2006-Apr-21 New work published in the international journal Molecular Cell provides insight into the composition and function of the human subcellular structure known as the Nucleolus. The work is a prime example of how integration of already published biological data can be analyzed to reveal novel aspects, not visible from any single type of data alone. Read more here:
[Molecular Cell] [PubMed] [Supplementary Information]

2005-Feb-4 The international journal Science today publishes new insight into the systemic aspect of cell cycle regulation in the model organism, bakers yeast. The research, which has been conducted in collaboration with Lars Juhl Jensen and Peer Bork of the European Molecular Biology Laboratory in Heidelberg, reveals that only some subunits of protein complexes are regulated during the cell cycle, but always such that the regulation ensures assembly of the functional complex just-in-time for action. Read more here:
[Press release] [Commentary in Nature Reviews] [Science Magazine] [PubMed] [Supplementary Information]

About the group

The group is interested in understanding how cells and molecular processes function and play together as systems. Our focus is thus not on individual genes or proteins, but rather on how the interplay between many components create modules and systems, and how defects in these modules can lead to human disease. The group members are constantly working on finding novel ways of integrating experimental and predicted data on coding and non-coding sequence, structure, localization, modification, function, expression, pathways, and interaction to ellucidate complex biological mechanisms. The group is highly interdisciplinary and includes biologists, engineers, pharmacists, physicists, programmers, and disease experts.

Current areas of interest include:

• Finding new genes and protein modules involved in human disease
• Uncovering how cell division is regulated in different organism
• Elucidating how cancer affects the cell at a systemic level
• Understanding cellular regulation and its evolution from a systems perspective
• Studying the extent and impact of alternative splicing

Selected Publications

• A large-scale analysis of tissue-specific pathology and gene expression of human disease genes and complexes
  Lage K, Hansen NT, Karlberg EO, Eklund AC, Roque FS, Donahoe PK, Szallasi Z, Jensen TS, Brunak S.
  Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 105(52):20870-5, 2008. PMID: 19104045
  
  
• A human phenome-interactome network of protein complexes implicated in genetic disorders
  K. Lage, E.O. Karlberg, Z.M. Storling, P.I. Olason, A.G. Pedersen, O. Rigina, A.M. Hinsby, Z. Tumer, F. Pociot, N. Tommerup, Y. Moreau, S. Brunak
  Nature Biotechnology, 25(3):309-16, 2007. PMID: 17344885
  
  
• Co-evolution of transcriptional and posttranslational cell cycle regulation
  L.J. Jensen, T.S. Jensen, U. de Lichtenberg, S. Brunak and P. Bork
  Nature, 2006. PMID: 17006448
  
  
• A Wiring of the Human Nucleolus
  A.M Hinsby, L. Kiemer, E.O. Karlberg, K. Lage, A. Fausbøll, A.S. Juncker, J.S. Andersen, M. Mann and S. Brunak
  Molecular Cell, 22, 285-295, 2006. PMID: 16630896
  
  
• Dynamics of complex formation during the yeast cell cycle
  U. de Lichtenberg, L.J. Jensen, S. Brunak and P. Bork
  Science, 307(5709), Feb 4., 2005. PMID:15692050
  
  
• Protein feature based identification of cell cycle regulated proteins in yeast
  U. de Lichtenberg, T.S. Jensen, L.J. Jensen and S. Brunak
  Journal of Molecular Biology, 329, 663-74, 2003. PMID: 12787668
  
  
• Prediction of human protein function from post-translational modifications and localization features
  L.J. Jensen, R. Gupta, N. Blom, D. Devos, J. Tamames, C. Kesmir, H. Nielsen, H.H. Stærfeldt, K. Rapacki, C. Workman, C. A. F. Andersen, S. Knudsen, A. Krogh, A. Valencia and S. Brunak
  Journal of Molecular Biology, 319, 1257-1265, 2002. PMID: 12079362