Francis Stewart

Francis Stewart, Biotec, TU-Dresden The acquisition of complete genome sequences has fundamentally altered the biosciences and medicine. Now an organism can be defined by a complete list of genes. This finite dimension permits top-down approaches to understanding life, and raises the prospect of integrating data into systems-based descriptions. However the complete list of genes is only the first step. To understand living systems, the function of every gene, their regulatory interactions and networks need to be defined. Hence we face huge challenges.

My lab has been working on the premise that the next steps towards tackling these challenges involves mapping proteomes and regulomes. These data sets will improve our ability to understand living systems by reducing complexity and delivering tractable structure. The best way to map both proteomes and regulomes employs protein tagging. Hence we have been developing the methodology to tag proteins fluently for genome-scale projects in proteome and regulome mapping. Recombineering, the method we pioneered for fluent DNA engineering, is proving to be particularly useful for high throughput tagging projects.