Grant: Project Grant

Communication between cells that make up our body is essential. It is required to ensure that our body functions accurately during our lifetime. Failure for cells to send, to receive or to correctly understand signals may lead to diseases such as cancer. The cellular actors responsible for such signals are called proteins. Some of these proteins, called receptors, are located at the surface of cells to receive outside signals. Most, if not all proteins do not act individually but rather function as groups, called networks. Our main goal is to decipher how cells establish a specific response to given outside cues by using receptors to build protein networks, and to delineate how these networks are deregulated in cancer cells. To achieve this, our work seeks to determine how signalling networks are assembled and dismantled, what rules govern the association of proteins into networks and how cells decide which of the many protein networks to use.