The Center for Quantitative Biology at Princeton University's Lewis-Sigler Institute was established in August 2004 by NIH grant P50 GM071508 from the National Institute of General Medical Sciences (NIGMS), one of the National Institutes of Health (NIH). The Lewis-Sigler Institute serves as the center's hub, with this website providing links to resources and publications associated with the Center.

The Princeton Center is headed by David Botstein, Principal Investigator, and James Broach, Co-Principal Investigator.

The mission of the Center is to discover on a systems level how biological molecules interact and respond to their environment using advanced computational methods. The Center grant supports research programs in system-level biology and a broad array of infrastructure. We currently have in place functioning facilities for DNA microarray manufacture, working genomic databases, and are proceeding with the development of new methods for analysis and display of large data sets.

Work has begun on several research programs and we have established a new internal seminar series for quantitative biologists at Princeton that discusses ideas and work in progress. This nicely complements the already well-established formal Institute seminar series in biophysics and genomics that consists mainly of speakers invited from outside Princeton.

We have also inaugurated the first two courses in a new undergraduate Integrated Science curriculum, in a planned six-course program.

Thanks in part to Center funds, we now have at Princeton fully functional facilities for DNA microarrays, microarray databases, imaging and mass spectrometry. All four facilities are available to all Princeton researchers.

As a result of Center funding, we also now offer diverse kinds of DNA microarrays at a highly advantageous cost to all Princeton researchers. Due to our ability to manufacture our own arrays, and to obtain expensive reagents and commercial arrays at very substantial quantity discounts, microarray research at Princeton has been made truly affordable. Center-funded projects, of course, also receive explicit funds for purchasing the microarrays for the facility. The use of the database is free to all Princeton researchers, and the data once published will be made available to the public.