“The origins of complexity in protein phosphorylation networks and cancer”

Biological systems are incredibly complex and they can fail in many different ways to cause disease. This is best illustrated by considering protein phosphorylation networks and how they are deregulated in cancer. My lab is trying to trace the origins of this complexity by using a mix of cell biology, synthetic biology, biochemistry and mathematical modelling. This toolkit allows us to move away from classic reductionist biology – which is best suited to studying how individual genes function in isolation – toward more holistic approaches that can address how signalling enzymes function together within networks. In particular, we are trying to understand how kinases and phosphatases cooperate to give the right type of response during cell division. Although this topic will be relevant for those studying genome stability, the main messages of this talk will be broad and should therefore appeal to anybody with a general interest in signalling and disease.