Welcome to the Laboratory of Systems Biology and Genetics!

About us

Gene regulatory networks play a vital role in metazoan development and function, and deregulation of these networks is often implicated in disease. The interactions between genes and their respective regulatory transcription factors (TFs) that form the basis of gene regulatory networks have however been poorly characterized. This is because the transcriptional function of most metazoan TFs, which denotes the regulatory elements they bind to, the genes they regulate, the transcriptional consequence of their DNA interactions, and the transcriptional complexes in which they function, remains unknown. The overall goal of our laboratory is to reverse engineer the gene regulatory networks that control metazoan development and function.

Main goals are:

(1) to identify the regulatory elements that control metazoan gene expression, and the TFs that bind to them using high-throughput technologies

(2) to model the behavior of specific gene regulatory networks under distinct physiological or pathological conditions

(3) to develop novel and innovative tools to detect and monitor protein-DNA interactions in vitro and in vivo

(4) to examine the impact of structural genomic variation on gene expression

Model systems:

(1) Mouse

• Stem cell renewal and differentiation
• Metabolism
• Circadian rhythms 
  
  

(2) Drosophila

• Wing development
• Neuroblast differentiation
• Rab GTPase expression

Representative publications:

J. Simicevic, B. Deplancke. DNA-centered approaches to characterize regulatory protein-DNA interaction complexes. Molecular Biosystems, 2010 (DOI: 10.1039/B916137F).

B. Deplancke. Experimental advances in the characterization of metazoan gene regulatory networks. Briefings in Functional Genomics and Proteomics, 8:12-27, 2009.

V. Vermeirssen*, B. Deplancke*, I. Barrasa*, J.S. Reece-Hoyes*, N.J. Martinez, H.E. Arda, C.A. Grove, A.J.M. Walhout. A C. elegans transcription factor array and Steiner Triple System-based smart pools: high-performance tools for transcription regulatory network mapping, Nature Methods, 4:659-664, 2007.

B. Deplancke, A. Mukhopadhyay, W. Ao, A.M. Elewa, C.A. Grove, N.J. Martinez, R. Sequerra, L. Doucette-Stamm, J.S. Reece-Hoyes, I.A. Hope, H.A. Tissenbaum, S.E. Mango, A.J.M. Walhout. A gene-centered, C. elegans protein-DNA interaction network, Cell, 125:1193-1205, 2006.