Welcome to Erik van Nimwegen's lab page at the Biozentrum of the University of Basel. We are a group of interdisciplinary researchers with backgrounds ranging from theoretical physics to molecular biology that are studying the function and evolution of the regulatory networks that cells use to control the expression of their genes. Typical questions that we are trying to address include: How are the regulatory networks encoded into the genome sequence? How is this regulatory code read out by the cell? How have these regulatory networks evolved? And, are there general `design principles' to these regulatory networks? Another key interest of our group is the identification of general quantitative laws in genome evolution.