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Hi my name is Madan Babu,
and I am a group leader at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge, UK.
What I'll do in the next 45 minutes or so is to
talk to you about a problem that we've been working on for the last few years,
which is to understand the structure,
evolution, and dynamics of transcription networks.
Research over the last several decades has
shown that proteins rarely function in isolation.
Instead, they interact with several components,
in the cell to carry out their function.
Taking your adoptive approach to understand how
biological system function has undoubtedly provided us with the wealth of information.
However, to understand how a complex system such as a cell functions,
one needs to go beyond individual proteins and really investigate the set of
all proteins and their interactions to uncover
general principles that govern these complex biological systems.
There are some systems where this is not possible,
and once that system is a transcriptional regulation network,
and this is going to be the topic of my presentation today.
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Before moving on with my presentation,
I'd like to spend a slide describing the work that we do in my group.
My group is basically interested in understanding how regulation is
achieved in cellular systems at different levels of complexity.
We addressed this problem by investigating
regulatory processes that involve protein-protein,
including protein nucleic acid,
and protein small molecule interactions,
at three distinct levels of complexity.
So, at the molecular level,
we aim to discover novel features of regulatory systems,
such as discovering new domains,
and identify function of uncharacterized proteins.
At the systems level,
we aim to understand how the different regulatory processes
influence each other in order to maintain cellular homeostasis.
And finally at the genomic level,
we aim to understand the interplay between regulation, and genome organization.
In today's presentation, rather than focus on one particular problem,
I'll try and give an overview of
several problems pertaining to transcription and regulatory networks.
The set of all interactions mediated by proteins within a cell,
