Quantitative Proteomics and Systems Biology
Ruedi Aebersold, Professor, ETH Zurich
Date Posted: Friday, July 18, 2008
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Launch presentation
About the speaker
Dr. Aebersold completed his undergraduate studies in biology at the University of Basel, Switzerland in 1979 and received a Ph.D. in cell biology at the Biocenter of the University of Basel in 1984. Holding fellowships from the Swiss National Science Foundation and EMBO, he joined the California Institute of Technology as a postdoctoral fellow (1984-86) and remained at Caltech as a senior research fellow (1986-88). In 1988, he joined the University of British Columbia in Vancouver as an assistant professor in the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology and as a senior investigator at the Biomedical Research Centre. In 1993, he moved to the University of Washington as an Associate Professor in Molecular Biotechnology and was promoted to full Professor in 1998. He served as the Associate Director for the Science and Technology Center for Molecular Biotechnology from 1994-2000. In 2000, he left the University of Washington and joined the Institute for Systems Biology as co-founder and full faculty member. In November 2004, he assumed an appointment as Professor of Systems Biology, Institute of Biotechnology, ETH-Zürich and Faculty of Natural Sciences, University of Zürich.
Dr. Aebersold’s research focuses on developing new methods and technologies for quantitative proteomics and for applying this emerging technology to enhance our understanding of the structure, function, and control of complex biological systems. Current applications of quantitative proteomics technology are directed towards the discovery of proteins markers that differentiate cancer cells from their normal counterparts, to the investigation of the mechanisms of fundamental cellular processes by the comparative analysis of the gene and protein expression profiles in cells at different states, and to studies in the area of medical microbiology.
Dr. Aebersold is an advisory editor for the journal Physiological Genomics, has been a member of the Editorial Advisory Boards of Protein Science (1992-‘98), Molecular and Cellular Proteomics (2001-present), Functional Proteomics (1999- present), Analytical Biochemistry (1991-2000) Functional and Integrative Genomics (1999-present), Electrophoresis (1989-1993), and Genome Technology (2003- ). He is the 2002 recipient of the Widmer Award, the ASMS Biemann Medal, and the World Technology Network Award in the biotechnology category.
Abstract
Systems biology attempts to reach a comprehensive understanding of complex biological processes and to study such processes as integrated systems rather than as a collection of isolated parts. Systems biology is made possible by the availability of the complete genome sequence of the human and other species and by advances in biology, engineering and computer science that have collectively catalyzed the emergence of technologies for the systematic and quantitative measurement of genomic and proteomic profiles and the integrative analysis of the obtained results. Of particular importance for systems biology is the ability to generate high quality, complete and quantitatively accurate data sets.
Proteomics is a central technology of systems biology because essentially any biological process consists of or involves proteins as structural elements, catalysts, regulators or in other functions. We therefore need to ask to what extent current proteomic approaches are capable to comprehensively analyze the proteome of a cell, tissue or species and how quantitative differences in the proteomes of perturbed cells can be analyzed. In this presentation we will discuss our attempts to comprehensively analyze the proteome of eukaryotic cells, the challenges such projects face and outline strategies to overcome them.
Launch presentation