Research Interests

To understand the structure of cell signalling networks and how they regulate cellular behaviour.

Cells are constantly exposed to changes in the extracellular environment and must react with speed and precision to these changes. The interest of the Cell Communication Team is to understand how cells respond to and processes these changes in a quantitative manner and how signalling networks integrate conflicting and augmenting signals to specifically alter cellular behaviour.

Reversible post-translational modifications such as phosphorylation play an important control-mechanism in cellular signal processes and influence events such as enzymatic activity, protein-protein interactions, cellular localization and protein stability. The ability of cells to correctly respond to the extracellular environment is frequently deregulated in diseases such as cancer, and as such kinases and phosphatases constitute prime cellular targets for intervention strategies. To further our understanding of the cellular signal processing mechanisms we are primarily interested in determining disease-causing effects in cellular phosphorylation networks.

We use mass spectrometry as a global approach to measure signal transduction events in a relative quantitative manner. Combining cellular labelling with stable isotopomeric versions of amino acids with analysis of post-translational events allow us to accurately determine the ‘signalling state’ and to compare this between multiple conditions.