Deplancke lab – Laboratory of Systems Biology and Genetics

The central research focus of the Laboratory of Systems Biology and Genetics (LSBG) is to understand genome organization, regulation, and variation and is broadly partitioned according to three major research pillars:

Adipo

In the “Adipo” pillar, we are characterizing the regulatory mechanisms driving mesenchymal stromal cell heterogeneity and function in adipose biology and other metabolically relevant processes.

Geno

In the “Geno” pillar, we are examining how variation in the regulatory code affects molecular and organismal diversity.

Techno

In the “Techo” pillar, we are developing novel microfluidic, high-throughput sequencing, single cell omic, and computational approaches, which are used to address biological questions in the other two pillars.

Latest news

15.06.2022

Professors Bart Deplancke awarded Advanced Grant from the Swiss National Science Foundation.

SinPhonies project description (Deplancke)

The ability to identify which genes are expressed in a single cell, called single cell transcriptomics (scRNA-seq), is revolutionizing biology by allowing us to address fundamental problems with unprecedented resolution, such as how cells develop into a plastic tissue or how they trigger disease. However, several major technological limitations of scRNA-seq remain.

The project, named SinPhonies for Single cell Phenomic technologies, aims to design two autonomous but synergistic technologies that each address a key limitation to advance single cell phenomena coupled to scRNA-seq.

28.04.2022

EPFL Professor Bart Deplancke awarded the Leenaards Science Prize with Dr Jeroen Geurts (CHUV) for a joint research project on obesity and osteoarthritis.

Official press release from Leenaards

14.02.2022

Bioengineers in Deplancke’s group have found a way to radically increase the efficiency of single-cell RNA-sequencing, a powerful tool that can “read” the genetic profile of an individual cell. Published in Nature Methods, the method is dubbed “DisCo” for “deterministic, mRNA-capture bead and cell co-encapsulation dropleting system”.