Kevin Titeca Email & Phone Number

Nature, art and engineering have always attracted me. My passion for network biology is not a coincidence, as I see it as an elegant combination of these domains. It fascinates me how molecular networks function collectively in the cell to ultimately yield the biological functions of life as we know it. I aim to uncover general organizing principles of the cell in health and disease, while contributing novel technologies for system-scale analysis. I believe that the future of research will increasingly depend on the optimal integration of experimentation and computation, especially considering the high-throughput data-acquisition inherent to network biology. Many challenges and opportunities remain, including the cross-fertilization of the different research fields within network biology.My post-doctoral research integrates proteomics and lipidomics to study the lipid transfer proteins. These proteins enable non-vesicular lipid transport through aqueous spaces, and their dysfunction can lead to diseases. They are crucial for many molecular processes because a large part of the proteome depends on membranes for its function. However, for the majority of the more than 100 lipid transfer proteins in humans, the lipid cargoes, the integration into metabolism, the mode of action, and the targeted organelles remain unknown.My doctoral research involved the development of novel technologies Virotrap and SFINX, for the large-scale analysis of protein-protein interactions. Virotrap is a "wet lab" technology for the detection of protein interactions that eliminates the need for cell homogenization by the use of the virus biology of the Gag protein of HIV. SFINX stands for "straightforward filtering index" and is a "dry lab" technology for highly accurate, extremely fast and easy removal of false positives from interactomics datasets. The SFINX software is accessible via its user-friendly web interface at http://sfinx.ugent.be/ and via its R package from CRAN.

Listed skills include Molecular Biology, Cell Culture, Biochemistry, Cell Biology, and 30 others.