At the Division of Systems and Synthetic Biology, SysBio, biologists, chemists, mathematicians, and engineers work together with the goal of understanding and quantitatively describing the complex functioning of living organisms. Based on that understanding, we develop technologies that contribute to human health and to biosustainability.
System-level understanding of life can be exploited in many useful applications. Synthetic biology, which uses mathematical models in combination with the latest genome editing procedures, develops efficient cell factories for sustainable bio-production of food, chemicals, and high-value compounds.
The knowledge obtained by systems biology is also used to understand the molecular mechanisms behind human health and disease, and design novel prevention, diagnostic and treatment strategies.
In addition to contributing cutting-edge science, SysBio is very active in undergraduate and postgraduate education, and has a strong tradition of patenting and spinning out new technologies.
The Division of Systems and Synthetic Biology is part of the Department of Life Sciences. SysBio is headed by Professor Ivan Mijakovic and is currently composed of 11 research groups, each working on independent research topics.
Our research labs
Bengtsson-Palme Lab
Our research is centred on the ecology and evolution of opportunistic pathogens, the genes involved in virulence, competition, and antibiotic resistance, as well as the factors that support interactions between bacteria in microbiomes. The aim of our research is to combine data-driven bioinformatic approaches with high-throughput molecular methods and the robust theories developed for plant and animal ecology to understand pathogens, microbial communities, and their interactions, in order to improve human and environmental health.
Chen Lab
Our research efforts focus on accelerating the development of future cell factories through integrated approach combining synthetic biology, systems biology, and evolution engineering. The aim is to develop novel, efficient microbial cell factories that can be used to solve a variety of societal challenges in environment, energy, and health.
David Lab
The focus of our research is the field of Synthetic Biology/Medical Biotechnology for next generation drug discovery and production. The goal is to further develop baker’s yeast, Saccharomyces cerevisiae, as an advanced drug discovery and production platform.
Faresjö Lab
Type 1 diabetes and celiac disease are two of the most common autoimmune diseases in children and the incidence of these diseases are high in Sweden. We work with translational immunology i.e., our research includes studies of immunological mechanisms and tools for prevention, diagnosis, and treatment of autoimmune diseases especially in children with type 1 diabetes and/or celiac disease.
Kerkhoven Lab
Our research revolves around metabolic systems biology, where model-driven analysis of experimental data is used to understand, predict, and engineer biology.
Mijakovic Lab
The work in our lab is driven by scientific curiosity: we seek to understand and describe how biology works. We sometimes also modify and engineer biological systems for various purposes useful to the society.
Molin Lab
An overarching goal of our research is to understand how signalling through the reactive oxygen species hydrogen peroxide impacts organismal physiology and disease as well as how such knowledge can be exploited in engineering health and biotechnology.
Nielsen Lab
Our research focus is on systems biology of metabolism with current focus on metabolism related to development of human diseases.
Polster Lab
Our research focuses on systems medicine approaches to complex diseases. We combine competences in clinical and translational medicine with systems biology, bioinformatics and statistical modelling.
Siewers Lab
Our lab uses state-of-the-art synthetic and systems biology technologies to engineer yeast cells for a vast variety of applications. These include:
Zelezniak Lab
The understanding and effective manipulation of biological systems, i.e., the ability to predict the behaviour of biological systems enables designing of highly efficient therapies against disease and engineering of microbial processes that can shift us from a fossil to sustainable society. Towards this, we couple computer and biological sciences by bridging state-of-the-art machine learning, bioinformatics, mathematical modelling together with experimental techniques to advance systems biology research. Our focus falls under the umbrella of three main research directions: • Regulation and control of gene expression • AI-driven synthetic biology for genome and protein engineering• Exploring the planet’s enzymatic repertoire for bioremediation
