Dr Kevin Robertson
Contact Details
Centre for Systems Biology at Edinburgh
The University of Edinburgh
CH Waddington Building, Room 2.11
King's Buildings Campus
Mayfield Road
Edinburgh
Scotland, UK
Telephone: +44 (0)131 651 9018
E-mail: kevin.robertson[a]ed.ac.uk
Research Interests
Over the past 10 years, the majority of my research has been targeted at increasing our understanding of immune responses to viral infection. This began with traditional cell-based functional assays and basic virology and has now progressed to high-throughput transcriptional profiling and work towards the mathematical modelling of cell signalling pathways.
Building on Division of Pathway Medicine interests in the complex interplay between Interferon, the Macrophage and Viral infection, my current research focuses are:
- The high-resolution characterisation of Macrophage transcriptional activity after Interferon Gamma activation
- The analysis of autocrine signalling-initiated transcriptional events following macrophage activation
- The development of a Host-Virus interaction Knowledgebase allowing us to interpret our data at a pathway level.
Over the next 2 to 3 years, work undertaken within the CSBE will move to systems-wide temporal analyses of viral interference with macrophage function and will evolve beyond transcriptional profiling to encompass dynamic analyses of the macrophage proteome, kinome etc.
Collaborations
From a collaborative perspective, I’m currently pursuing projects with the Structural Bioinformatics and Computational Genomics Groups from IMIM in Barcelona and Dr. Lars Doelken from the Max von Pettenkofer-Institut in Munich.
Selected Publications
Joan Planas-Iglesias, Kevin A. Robertson, Sobia Raza, Tom C. Freeman, Peter Ghazal and Baldo Oliva. New pathway models: the integration of protein interaction resources enhances our understanding of cellular systems. Submitted.
Sobia Raza, Kevin A. Robertson, Paul A Lacaze, David Page, Anton J Enright, Peter Ghazal and Tom C Freeman. A logic-based diagram of signalling pathways central to macrophage activation. BMC Systems Biology. In Press.
Buck AH, Santoyo-Lopez J, Robertson KA, Kumar DS, Reczko M, Ghazal P. 2007. Discrete clusters of virus-encoded microRNAs are associated with complementary strands of the genome and the 7.2-kilobase stable intron in murine cytomegalovirus. Journal of Virology. 81: 13761-70
Grimes GR, Moodie S, Beattie JS, Craigon M, Dickinson P, Forster T, Livingston AD, Mewissen M, Robertson KA, Ross AJ, Sing G, Ghazal P. 2005. GPX-Macrophage Expression Atlas: a database for expression profiles of macrophages challenged with a variety of pro-inflammatory, anti-inflammatory, benign and pathogen insults. BMC Genomics 6: 178
Arico E, Robertson KA, Belardelli F, Ferrantini M, Nash AA. 2004. Vaccination with inactivated murine gammaherpesvirus 68 strongly limits viral replication and latency and protects type I IFN receptor knockout mice from a lethal infection. Vaccine 22: 1433-40
Arico E, Robertson K, Allen D, Ferrantini M, Belardelli F, Nash AA. 2002. Humoral immune response and protection from viral infection in mice vaccinated with inactivated MHV-68: effects of type I interferon. J Interferon Cytokine Res 22: 1081-8
Robertson KA, Usherwood EJ, Nash AA. 2001. Regression of a murine gammaherpesvirus 68-positive B-cell lymphoma mediated by CD4 T lymphocytes. J Virol 75: 3480-2