Themed collection Molecular BioSystems Emerging Investigators 2012

Editor Harpal Minhas introduces this themed issue and presents the profiles of the contributing authors.

Metabolic flux analysis in plants is currently a low-throughput method. This opinion article suggests strategies for shifting towards high throughput.

This review covers the key developments in the quantitative genetics and network biology of the metabolome to deliver personalized medicine.

In this review we explain the current progress in robustness measurements in vivo using the gTOW method.

Oxidative stress is one of the most common alterations among psychiatric disorders.

Development of chemoselective transformations of the hydroxyl moiety is essential to the study of biological processes and the synthesis of complex natural products, but remains a challenging goal.

Emerging advances in systems and synthetic biology enable design, synthesis, and construction of complex consortia of cells toward programmable ecosystems.

Triple-colour labelling combined with a measurement and analysis scheme allows us to simultaneously study multiple regions within single intrinsically disordered proteins.

Probe BI-BODIPY, derived from polo-like kinase inhibitor BI2536, permits imaging of its kinase targets by fluorescence microscopy.

Signal sequence coding regions can only promote nuclear mRNA export when they are present near the 5′ end of the transcript.

Reactive Oxygen Species (ROS) are a natural by-product of cellular growth and proliferation, and are required for fundamental processes such as protein-folding and signal transduction.

Using H. sapiens protein–protein interaction network for computational isolation of topologically and functionally homogeneous “driver topology” enriched in disease genes, drug targets and driver genes.

LASSO regression on a tissue specific transcriptomic dataset is used to identify novel candidate genes in Arabidopsis seed mucilage biosynthesis. One candidate transcription factor has been described in detail and it shows a similar phenotype as the “bait” gene that was used.

Our work illuminates the cellular circuitry that controls a novel synergy between two clinically important molecules, cyclosporin A and micafungin, and supports the utility of chemogenomic assays for elucidating mechanisms of drug synergy.

We introduce a method by which pairs of genes are identified as functionally related when their expression profiles are more similar within species than the conservation across species.

We analyzed multi-omics data for wild-type and ΔarcA mutant Escherichia coli cultured under nitrate conditions.

Lipoprotein fractions in human blood have distinct profiles of polar metabolites, which differentially associate with insulin resistance.

The expansion of a human metabolic network by acylcarnitine metabolic pathways enabled the assembly of a comprehensive compendium of inborn errors of metabolism (IEMs) and its use for classification, topological, and functional analysis.

Spectral networks algorithms transform the paradigm for analysis of tandem mass spectra by finding and jointly interpreting spectra from related molecules, regardless of the structure or class of molecules.