An ambitious EC-funded research initiative on epigenetics advancing towards systems biology

We are interested in developing novel network biology approaches to study how cells respond to changes in the environment and how the environment shape the epigenome through signaling pathways, by integrating transcriptional, genetic, proteomic and biochemical data and using condition-specific interactomes. Our aim is to develop computational methods to identify context-specific cellular responses. Ultimately, we think that network analysis techniques are essential for carrying out complexity reduction in order to identify from the vast amount of high-throughput data the most affected sub-networks of the condition under study. Indeed, the identification of the most important building blocks of the cellular response would help detect the skeleton and the key players (nodes/proteins) on which it is possible to build kinetic ODE-based models.