Chicago Center for Systems Biology

Principal Investigator: Kevin White, Ph.D., University of Chicago

Chicago Center for Systems Biology website

The Chicago Center for Systems Biology (CCSB) is one of ten National Centers for Systems Biology funded by the National Institute of General Medical Sciences (NIGMS). The Center is located at The University of Chicago and represents a multi-disciplinary collaboration among researchers at Northwestern University and University of Illinois at Chicago, fostered by the Chicago Biomedical Consortium (CBC), with support from The Searle Funds at The Chicago Community Trust.

CCSB will study one of the most exciting and challenging questions in the field of Systems Biology “How do multiple genes or proteins, dozens or even hundreds at once, work together as networks to regulate the basic processes of life?” To answer that question, CCSB will concentrate on transcriptional networks, clusters of the master genes that regulate the activity of other genes by directly turning them on or off. CCSB has more than a dozen experts in genomics, developmental biology, evolutionary biology, stress and physiology, chemistry and physics, with several computational specialists who focus on network modeling, and high-performance computing.

The Center’s investigators will use increasingly complex biological models to study how a single cell turns on or off various genes in response to an environmental stress. They will also use model organisms such as yeast, worms and fruit flies to identify ancient stress-response circuits and learn how these have evolved differently in each system. Other topics involving fruit flies will look at the genetic networks that maintain both stability and flexibility for repeating anatomical patterns during development, and how gene transcription guides the decisions each cell must make as it chooses to become one of two cell types within a fly’s eye. In mammals, such as mice, a team of investigators will study the complex sets of chemical and genetic signals that guide stem cells in the bone marrow as they mature to become many different kinds of blood cells.