A gene chip is loaded with DNA by capillary needles
Work in our laboratories aims at the development and immediate application of new technologies for an analysis, assessment and description of the realisation of cellular function from genetic information and its regulation. New methods are directly applied to biological and biomedical studies. Concerning the analysis of human material, we are establishing systems for early diagnosis, disease prognosis and analysis of treatment results. Parallel studies are under way, for example for pancreatic cancer, on the epigenetic modulation of gene promoters, variations in transcription factor binding, changes of transcript levels and the actual protein expression and an investigation of protein interactions.
Another line of work aims at a combination of both the technical advances and access to global biological information toward an in vitro implementation of complex experimental processes. Motivation is their utilisation in Synthetic Biology for the production of molecules and the establishment of artificial molecular systems. Cell-free biosynthetic production will become important for many biotechnological and pharmacochemical challenges ahead. Complex experimental systems, on the other hand, are meant to complement current systems biology. By means of such in vitro systems, biological models can be evaluated experimentally. Similar to physics, insight into cellular functioning will be gained by an iterative processing of information by experimental and theoretical systems biology. Eventually, this may lead to the establishment of a fully synthetic self-replicating system and – in the long run – an archetypical model of a cell.