Triple boost for systems biology

The BBSRC's Julia Goodfellow: multidisciplinary vision

The centres will focus on dynamic biological systems such as biological clocks, the nature and behaviour of plant roots and signalling pathways in bacteria and yeasts. They will also be charged with producing a new generation of scientists able to work across current disciplinary boundaries.

The BBSRC says the work of the three centres, and three others established previously will make the outputs of biological research more useful and easier to apply to industry and policy making, as well as providing completely new ways of understanding biological processes.

Julia Goodfellow, chief executive of BBSRC said the centres reflected the vision of a multidisciplinary bioscience base, “where researchers work together, regardless of the name of the department to which they belong.”   

The Centre for Systems Biology at Edinburgh will bring together researchers from informatics, molecular plant sciences, medicine and cell biology to model dynamic biological systems including circadian rhythms, RNA metabolism and the interferon pathway. There will not be a focus on a single organism: instead the researchers aim to produce models that are broadly applicable.

Meanwhile, the Centre for Plant Integrative Biology at the University of Nottingham will develop a virtual root that will serve as an exemplar for models of other multicellular systems. The ultimate aim is to combine the model with other international projects that model shoot development, leading to a generic computer model for use in crop and plant science.

The Oxford Integrative Systems Biology Centre will look at the complex network pathways single cell organisms use to control their behaviour, with the aim of generating predictive models of biological networks. The centre will involve staff from the Departments of Biochemistry, Pathology, Chemistry, Maths, Statistics, Engineering and Computation.