Team

EPIC exploits the synergy of a multidisciplinary team with complementary expertise

WE OBSERVE

Post-transcriptional regulation is difficult to study. We need new methods to study mRNA fate and function.

Pelechano lab

WE MODEL

Extracting the regulatory code requires computational expertise and the application of AI-based models

Gagneur lab

WE TEST

These models in turn need to be validated and tuned through innovative ultra high-throughput assays.

Verstrepen lab

"We will exploit the advantages of the model eukaryote Saccharomyces cerevisiae and other yeast species covering a broad evolutionary range to derive the first comprehensive sequence-based model of eukaryotic gene regulation. An original aspect of EPIC is how much we will leverage evolution. As Theodosius Dobzhansky famously stated, nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution."

Kevin Verstrepen

VIB-KU Leuven Center for Microbiology

"EPIC will allow us to understand and predict gene regulation – and ultimately phenotype – from DNA. This will close a major gap in basic biology, while also opening exciting avenues for potential applications. Our new insights could, for example, be applied in biotechnology, from pinpointing disease-causing mutations to the rational design of genes, RNAs, and cells."

Julien Gagneur

TU MUnchen

"We aim to end up with a chatbot (not unlike the by-now famous ChatGPT) for DNA; a model that can predict how a gene will be regulated, or how mutations will affect regulation, and which can even be used to suggest de novo regulatory sequences that can be used in biotechnology."

Vicente Pelechano

Karolinska Institute

Meet the team

Kevin Verstrepen

VIB & KU Leuven, Belgium | Coordinating PI

Verstrepen is a leader in yeast genetics who performed foundational work on regulatory network evolution. Verstrepen’s unique collection of >150 diverse yeast species, expertise in genome assembly, strain engineering and synthetic biology and his automatized platforms are key to the success of EPIC.

Biosketch Verstrepen lab

Vicente Pelechano

Karolinska Institute, Sweden

As a molecular biologist, Vicente Pelechano pioneered methods to investigate post-transcriptional regulation, established pipelines for analysis of this type of data, and was one of the first to reveal extensive transcript isoform variability.

Biosketch Pelechano lab

Julien Gagneur

TU Munich, Germany

Trained in machine learning, Gagneur discovered and modeled sequence determinants of post-transcriptional steps in various species, developed innovative deep learning models for regulatory genomics and co-founded the Kipoi repository for regulatory genomics models.

Biosketch Gagneur lab