Maerkl

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Focus A microfluidic device containing 2400 unit cells, controlled by over 7200 micro-mechanical valves. My lab is interested in applying state of the art microfluidic technology to relevant problems in systems biology. We have developed highly-integrated microfluidic devices containing thousands of functional elements. With these devices it is possible to drastically improve throughput in biology, allowing us to interrogate and characterize complex biological networks in unprecedented scale, while maintaining a high degree of fidelity. Our microfluidic platform has been successfully applied to characterizing protein-DNA, protein-RNA, and protein-protein interactions as well as to drug discovery. The labs biological interests lie in the analysis of yeast interaction networks, including transcriptional regulatory networks as well as protein-protein interaction networks to understand the principal parameters governing these systems. A second focus of our lab is in vivo single cell analysis of protein expression, localization, and noise patterns to understand the dynamic properties of biological networks. News August 2008 Read our Nature Biotechnology article describing the application of MITOMI to drug discovery for a Hepatitis C membrane protein. June 2008 Nano-Tera awarded a NTF grant to the Laboratory of Biological Network Characterization to develop the next generation of microfluidic devices. For more information on the Nano-Tera initiative click here. March 2008 Prof. Maerkl received one of eight SystemsX RTD grants by the Swiss National Science Foundation to conduct research in the field of Systems Biology. The team involves a total of 4 PIs, including Prof. David Shore (U. Geneva), Prof. Michael Unser (EPFL), Prof. Felix Naef (EPFL), and Dr. Jacques Rougemont (EPFL) forming a dynamic team covering fields ranging from yeast molecular biology, image analysis, computational biology, bioinformatics, to microfluidics and synthetic biology. For more information visit the SystemsX website.