The research in the Taipale lab is organized around two central themes: technology development in functional genomics and proteomics and the organization and function of the human protein homeostasis network in health and disease. Individual projects in the lab are very diverse, spanning bacterial toxins to transcriptional regulation to rare disorders to chaperone/client interactions. But despite this diversity, all projects share common features. We take advantage of – or develop new – large-scale systematic ‘omics’ methods and use them as an entry point to understand biological processes. In particular, we aim to understand these processes through the lens of interactions between molecules – be they proteins, DNA, RNA, or small-molecule compounds. Another similarity is that all projects involve close collaborations with other research groups. Not only are collaborations a lot of fun, but they also allow us to tackle the inevitable tradeoff between the breadth and depth of expertise.