Wageningen University and Research Centre, The Netherlands
Description of organization
The Wageningen UR (University & Research centre) is an internationally leading education and research organization and, with more than 5,000 employees, it is the largest organization in the Netherlands focusing on the life sciences. It is ranked in the top 20 in The Times Higher Education World University Ranking 2011-2012 within the subject Life Sciences. The WUR has set Systems Biology as one of its strategic spearheads towards its mission “To explore the potential of nature to improve the quality of life”. Accordingly, it has established a new Department of Systems and Synthetic Biology (www.ssb.wur.nl) as well as the Wageningen Centre for System Biology (www.systemsbiology.wur.nl/UK/), with a specific focus on Food, Feed & Health. The overarching approach across the programmes is Multiscale Modeling as a way to link the different levels of organization in biological systems. Accordingly, the WCSB leads and is involved in a series of Systems Medicine initiatives revolving around the Virtual Organ(ism). These involves projects such as the Virtual Gut, which involves a number of academic, clinical and industrial groups, and has the explicit goal to understand, quantify, model and, ultimately, predict the function of the intestinal tract of mammals in relation to diet; SystemTB (www.systemTB.org) for the establishment of a Systems Biology framework to understand key features of Mycobacterium tuberculosis and the INFECT (www.infect.org), on the Systems Biology of Sepsis, among other
Profile of staff members
Vitor Martins dos Santos is the Director of the Wageningen Centre for Systems Biology and Head of the Laboratory of Systems and Synthetci Biology. The WCSB leads and is involved in a series of Systems Medicine initiatives revolving around the Virtual Organ(ism). These involves projects such as the Virtual Gut, which involves a number of academic, clinical and industrial groups, and has the explicit goal to understand, quantify, model and, ultimately, predict the function of the intestinal tract of mammals in relation to diet. Vitor Martins dos Santos participates in initiatives such as the SystemTB (www.systemTB.org) for the establishment of a Systems Biology framework to understand key features of Mycobacterium tuberculosis and the INFECT (www.infect.org), on the Systems Biology of Sepsis, the ESFRI project Infrastructure for Systems Biology in Europe (ISBE), Microme, a workflow for the automated annotation and reconstruction of metabolic models, and the Dutch Techcentre for the Life Sciences (DTL) and Data Integration and Stewardship Centre (DISC)–DTL is a collaborative public‑private initiative to provide high‑end and pioneer technology to enable ground‑breaking research in molecular biosciences (www.dtls.nl).
Recent publications relevant to the project
1. Martins dos Santos, VAP, Damborski, J. Systems Biology at Work. Curr Op Biotechnol, 2010. 21:498-501
2. Martins dos Santos, VAP, Müller, M, de Vos W. Systems Biology of the Gut: The Interplay of Food, Microbiota and Host at the Mucosal Interface Curr Op Biotechnol2010. 21(4):539-50
3. Oberhardt M, Puchalka J, Martins dos Santos, VAP, Papin JA. Reconciliation of Genome-Scale Metabolic Reconstructions for Comparative Systems Analysis PLoS Comp Biol. 2011 (3):e1001116.
4. Arumugam M, Raes J, ... Zoetendal EG, Wang J, Guarner F, Pedersen O, de Vos WM, ... Bork P. Enterotypes of the human gut microbiome. Nature. 2011;473(7346):174-80
5. Wells JM, Rossi O, Meijerink M, van Baarlen P. Epithelial crosstalk at the microbiota-mucosal interface. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2011;108 Suppl 1:4607-1