Research summary
The cell is the fundamental unit of life. Yet its inner workings are far more complex than we ever imagined, and we still lack a good working model. Without such a model, it is difficult to develop new drugs to repair diseased cells, or to build new cells to produce much-needed chemicals and materials.
As Canada Research Chair in Computational and Systems Biology, Dr. Yu Xia aims to improve this situation by building a global model of cell circuitry at atomic resolution. He and his research team are developing computational methods to construct accurate, genome-scale, atomic-level structural models for protein–protein interactions in yeast species, in humans, and between human and microbial pathogens. Ultimately, the resulting high-resolution model of cell circuitry will be used to probe evolutionary and design principles of biological networks within and between species. It will also shed light on the mechanisms of infectious and genetic diseases at the systems level.