The director of the Center for Genomic Regulation (CRG) in Barcelona, Luis Serrano, explained the latest developments of his research group on Systems Biology in a conference of the series of seminars IDIBELL on February 24.

One of the highlights of the Serrano team is to study proteins, not as single molecules, but as parts of a system that is more than the sum of its biological components. “Proteins are not alone in the cell, they are always bound to other proteins, forming complexes … and binding competition between these proteins affects other signaling pathways and may lead to alterations in gene expression”.

That is the reason why one of his research lines is to study how protein concentration in the cell can cause disease, “Until recently it was believed that diseases were the result of a genetic mutation, we are now demonstrating that it’s sufficient with varying the concentration of a protein, and this is an epigenetic change, to result in a disease without any initial mutation. “