Ivan Erill

Biography

Life is information. Information is processed both during an organism life-time and across generations by natural selection. In fact, life is probably the most complex information processing system ever created. As Robert Robbins fittingly put it, the DNA sequence of an organism is “the result of literally millions of maintenance revisions performed by the worst possible set of kludge–using, spaghetti–coding, opportunistic hackers (i.e. evolution) who delight in clever tricks like writing self–modifying code and relying upon undocumented system quirks”. As a result, deciphering molecular biology is the ultimate dream of a computer scientist.

Research Interest

My research interests lie primarily in the evolution of transcriptional regulatory networks in Bacteria, specifically on the co-evolution of transcription factors, their cognate binding sites and the regulatory networks they spawn to fulfill complex regulatory programs involved in key pathogenic processes, such as the transfer of antiobiotic resistance determinants or the creation of biofilms. My lab uses evolutionary simulations, biophysical and dynamic models, systems biology and comparative genomics approaches to probe into the evolution of transcriptional regulatory networks. My lab also works on the creation of community-oriented services for the annotation of scientific data, such as the CollecTF database (www.collectf.org) dedicated to compiling data on transcription factor-binding sites across the Bacteria domain. This work involves the design and development of biological databases, working in close collaboration with ontology development groups and core development teams at large biomedical data repositories, such as the NCBI and the EMBL-EBI.