About the editors

Senior Editor: Ruedi Aebersold

Ruedi Aebersold is a founding member of the Institute for Systems Biology in Seattle, Washington, where he has led the proteomics program of the Institute. The program is focused on developing new methods and technologies for quantitative proteomics and for applying this emerging technology to enhance our understanding of the structure, function, and control of complex biological systems. In November 2004, he assumed an appointment at ETH-Zurich and the University of Zurich, Switzerland, as Professor of Systems Biology.

Senior Editor: Peer Bork

Peer Bork is joint coordinator of the Structural and Computational Biology programme at EMBL and also holds an appointment at the Max-Delbrueck Center for Molecular Medicine in Berlin. He is a computational biologist and has worked on various aspects of function prediction.

Senior Editor: George Church

George Church is Professor of Genetics at Harvard Medical School and Director of the Center for Computational Genetics. With degrees from Duke University in Chemistry and Zoology, his PhD from Harvard in Biochemistry & Molecular Biology with Walter Gilbert included the first direct genomic sequencing method in 1984. He invented the broadly-applied concepts of molecular multiplexing and tags, homologous recombination methods, and array DNA synthesizers. His current research focuses on integrating biosystems-modeling with personal genomics & synthetic biology.

Senior Editor: Leroy Hood

Leroy Hood is recognized as one of the world's leading scientists in molecular biotechnology and genomics. A passionate and dedicated researcher, he holds numerous patents and awards for his scientific breakthroughs and prides himself on his life-long commitment to making science accessible and understandable to the general public. In 2000, Dr. Hood co-founded the Institute for Systems Biology in Seattle, Washington to pioneer systems approaches to biology and medicine. He serves as President of the Institute and continues to pursue his interest in biology, medicine, technology, development, and computational biology.

Senior Editor: Edison Liu

Edison Liu is Executive Director of The Genome Institute of Singapore. Recognized as a top breast cancer researcher, Dr Liu was a pioneer in using an integrated investigative approach to decipher the biology of human breast cancers and to the discovery of clinically useful biomarkers. His gene-discovery strategy identified novel kinases and gene cassettes involved in maintaining the cancer phenotype. His recent work centers on the expression genomics of human cancers and the use of transcription genetics in deciphering cryptic signaling pathways.

EMBO Editor: Thomas Lemberger

Thomas completed his PhD at the University of Lausanne, where he studied hormonal regulation of gene expression by nuclear receptors. He moved then to Heidelberg where his research focused on the regulation of transcription in the brain.

Executive Director EMBO - Associate Editor: Frank Gannon

Frank is the Executive Director of EMBO, the Secretary General of the European Molecular Biology Conference, and is a senior scientist at the EMBL in Heidelberg, with an active research group working on the estrogen receptor.

EMBO - Associate Editor: Les Grivell

Les is Manager of EMBO's Electronic Information Programme. He was trained as molecular biologist. After a career as head of a research group at the University of Amsterdam, he moved to EMBO, where his current activities include focus on facilitating access to and improving interconnectivity of digital information.

Advisory Editorial Board

Julie Ahringer is a Group leader at the Gurdon Institute at the University of Cambridge. Her laboratory carried out the first systematic inactivation of the majority of genes in the nematode C. elegans through use of a genome-wide RNA interference library. She continues to use genomic approaches to study different biological processes, including transcriptional regulation, cell polarity, and genome evolution.

Charles Auffray is Research Director at CNRS, heads the Genexpress team in Functional Genomics and Systems Biology for Health in Villejuif, France. He has interests in the physio-pathology of the immune and neuro-muscular systems and cancer by integrating biochemistry, cellular and molecular biology together with mathematical, statistical and computational approaches.

Ewan Birney is a Team Leader at the European Bioinformatics Institute, head of Genome Annotation and a Senior Scientist at EMBL. He runs the EBI side of the Ensembl project, a software system that annotates and displays vertebrate genomes. He is also a key figure in the development of the Reactome project.

Tom Blundell is Sir William Dunn Professor of Biochemistry at the University of Cambridge. His research interests are in the molecular architecture of living organisms, with an emphasis on growth factors, receptor activation and signal transduction, important in cancer and other diseases.

Thomas S. Deisboeck is Assistant Professor of Radiology at Harvard Medical School and Director of the Complex Biosystems Modeling Laboratory at the Harvard-MIT (HST) Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging at Massachusetts General Hospital. His primary research interest is the interdisciplinary modeling of cancer biology.

Jan Ellenberg is a group leader at the EMBL in Heidelberg. His research group works on the functional dynamics of nuclear structure during the cell cycle combining advanced quantitative fluorescence microscopy approaches and computer simulations of biological processes.

Michael Elowitz is Assistant Professor, biology and applied physics at Caltech. His team is interested in how genetic circuits operate and evolve in living cells. Using experimental and theoretical approaches, the group studies the behaviour of simple genetic elements, and the circuits they comprise, at the single cell level.

Alan Fersht is Director of the MRC Centre for Protein Engineering and Professor of Organic Chemistry in the University of Cambridge. His major research interests are in the structure, function and folding of proteins and their misfolding and instability in cancer and other diseases.

Stan Fields is an investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and a Professor in the Department of Genome Sciences and the Department of Medicine at the University of Washington in Seattle. His laboratory works on technologies to analyze protein function, especially on a proteome-wide basis, including methods to detect the interactions of proteins with other macromolecules. The laboratory also uses yeast to study proteins relevant to human biology, including aging-associated proteins and proteins encoded by the major malaria pathogen.

Mark Gerstein is the Albert L Williams Associate Professor of Biomedical Informatics at Yale University. He is co-director the Yale Computational Biology and Bioinformatics Program. His research is focused on bioinformatics, and he is particularly interested in large-scale integrative surveys, biological database design, macromolecular geometry, molecular simulation, human genome annotation, gene expression analysis, and data mining.

Frank Holstege is head of the Genomics Laboratory at the University Medical Center Utrecht in the Netherlands. The laboratory has interests in mechanisms of eukaryotic transcription regulation. It combines a microarray facility and technology group with a bioinformatics group that is engaged in mining of DNA microarray data and integrative analyses of genome-scale datasets.

Sung Hou Kim is Director of Calvin Laboratory, UCB, the Head of the Berkeley Structural Genomics Center, LBNL, and Head of the Structural Biology Department, Physical Biosciences Division, LBNL. His research interests are in combining biophysical, biochemical and computational genomics approaches to understand structure-function relationship and folding principles of proteins at the molecular and genomic levels.

Hiroaki Kitano is director of Sony Computer Science Laboratories, Inc. and Director of the Systems Biology Institute, Tokyo Japan. His recent research interests concern biological robustness, cancer systems biology, software platforms for systems biology and robotics.

Doron Lancet is Professor in the Department of Molecular Genetics, and Director of Israel's National Center for Genomics. He discovered the molecular basis of smell transduction, and currently studies the genomics and population genetics of human olfaction. He developed GeneCards, a widely used web-based gene compendium, and does research in proteomics, transcriptomics, medical genetics and prebiotic evolution.

Andrew J. Link is an Ingram Assistant Professor of Cancer Research in the Department of Microbiology and Immunology at Vanderbilt University School of Medicine in Nashville, TN. His research focuses on the application of mass spectrometry-based proteomics to biological problems and his interests include protein translation, transcription, protein interactions, and technology development.

Stephen Oliver is Professor in the School of Biological Sciences at the University of Manchester. His research interests focus on the molecular genetics of yeasts and fungi, functional genomics and genome evolution.

Jeremy Nicholson is Professor and Head of Biological Chemistry at Imperial College, London University. His research interests include: biological NMR spectroscopy, novel LC-MS and electrochemical approaches to bioanalysis, chemometrics, metabolic modelling and studies leading to the understanding the molecular basis of disease and toxic processes.

Bernhard Palsson is Professor of Bioengineering and Adjunct Professor Medicine at the University of California, San Diego. His current research at UCSD focuses on the reconstruction of genome-scale biochemical reaction networks, the development of mathematical analysis procedures for genome-scale models, and the experimental verification of genome-scale models with current emphasis on cellular metabolism and transcriptional regulation in E. coli and yeast.

Rama Ranganathan is HHMI Investigator and Associate Professor of Pharmacology at The University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center at Dallas. He is interested in understanding the structural principles of function in cellular signaling systems and how these systems are built through the process of evolution.

Uwe Sauer is Professor of Systems Biology at the ETH Zurich. His research interests focus on complex metabolic and regulation networks in bacteria and yeast. For this purpose, his group develops methods for ¹³C-flux analysis and metabolomics, both for quantitative and high throughput analyses, that are combined with computational models.

Luis Serrano is Head of the Structural and Computational Biology Unit at the EMBL, Heidelberg. His research group is investigating how to combine protein structural information with protein design algorithms to predict protein-protein and protein-dna interactions.

Lucy Shapiro is Ludwig Professor of Cancer Research in the Department of Developmental Biology at the Stanford University School of Medicine and the Director of the Beckman Center for Molecular and Genetic Medicine at Stanford. The focus of her work is the genetic circuitry that controls the progression of the cell cycle and the 3 D deployment of regulatory proteins that coordinates the cell cycle regulatory network.

Pamela Silver is Professor of Systems Biology at Harvard Medical School and the Director of the Harvard University-wide PhD Program in Systems Biology. She is also a member of the Department of Cancer Biology at the Dana Farber Cancer Institute. Her research interests include the systems biology of RNA, understanding the dynamics of intranuclear networks, using cell-based screens for pathway discovery, and synthetic biology to design eukaryotic cells.

Michael Snyder is Lewis B. Cullman Professor of Molecular and Cellular Biology and Professor of Molecular Biophysics and Biochemistry at Yale University. He is also the Director of the Yale Center of Genomics and Proteomics. His laboratory study was the first to carry out a large-scale functional genomics project in any organism, and currently carries out a variety of projects in the areas of genomics and proteomics both in yeast and humans.

Janet Thornton is Director of the EMBL - European Bioinformatics Institute on the Wellcome Trust Genome Campus at Hinxton, near Cambridge, on secondment from UCL/Birkbeck College London. She is an Honorary Professor in the Department of Chemistry, University of Cambridge. Her research focuses on the functions and interactions of proteins with other molecules in the cell from a structural perspective with the goal of improving rational drug design.

Masaru Tomita is a Professor and the Director of the Institute for Advanced Biosciences, Keio University, and a founder of Human Metabolome Technologies, Inc. He is the Principal Investigator of the e-CELL Project, which was founded in 1996 with the objective of modeling and simulating cellular metabolism. His research interests are bioinformatics, metabolomics, genome informatics and biological simulation.

Marc Vidal is an Associate Professor in Cancer Biology and the Director of the Center for Cancer Systems Biology at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and an Associate Professor of Genetics at Harvard Medical School. His laboratory studies how complex macromolecular networks are organized and how perturbations in those networks can lead to diseases such as cancer.

Hans V. Westerhoff is AstraZeneca Professor of Systems Biology at the Manchester Centre for Integrative Systems Biology (heading the Doctoral Training Centre Systems Biology), Professor of Microbial Physiology at the Free University Amsterdam and of Mathematical Biochemistry at the University of Amsterdam. Chairing the Steering Committee of the German HepatoSys program, he has worked on Hierarchical Control and Regulation, the siliconcell, EGF signalling, and DNA structure, exemplifying bottom-up Systems Biology.

Lothar Willmitzer is Director of the Max Planck Institute of Molecular Plant Physiology. His research interests focus around the small molecules/metabolites present in plant cells. More specifically his group is interested in the biosynthesis, transport and storage of such molecules an in the genes that control these processes.

John Yates is a Professor in the Department of Cell biology at The Scripps Research Institute. His research interests include development of integrated methods for tandem mass spectrometry analysis of protein mixtures, bioinformatics using mass spectrometry data, and proteomics. He is the lead inventor of the SEQUEST software for correlating tandem mass spectrometry data to sequences in the database.