Research Groups
Protein Structure and Bioinformatics
Research Interests and Description
Research Interests
Bioinformatics and systems biology of genomes and proteomes, models of communication and cooperation in biology, NOTCH signalling, network models, protein chemistry.
Description of Research
The Group is interested in the principles of communicaton and cooperation in biology that we study with the tools of bioinformatics, structural biology and protein chemistry. Our current bioinformatics topics include computational analysis of bacterial communications using agent-based models of bacterial communities and genome analysis, the development of computational tools for parallel and manycore computer architectures and novel search techniques for proteomics. In structural biology we study the proteins of the Notch signalling network and its involvement in genetic diseases, using NMR spectroscopy and biophysical methods. The Group operates the protein chemistry facility of ICGEB that produces synthetic peptides for other Groups at ICGEB Trieste and conducts research projects aimed at developing novel lab-scale and pilot scale synthesis methods for the synthesis of modified peptides and chemically modified recombinant proteins used in pharmaceutical applications.
Recent Publications
Kuzniar, A., Dhir, S., Nijveen, H., Pongor, S., Leunissen, J.A.M. 2010. Multi-netclust: an efficient tool for finding connected clusters in multi-parametric networks. Bioinformatics 26, 2482-2483 PubMed link
Venturi, V., Bertani, I., Kerényi, Á., Netotea, S., Pongor, S. 2010. Co-Swarming and Local Collapse: Quorum Sensing Conveys Resilience to Bacterial Communities by Localizing Cheater Mutants in Pseudomonas aeruginosa. PLoS One 5, 4 PubMed link
Guarnaccia, C., Dhir, S., Pintar, A., Pongor, S. 2009. The Tetralogy of Fallot-associated G274D mutation impairs folding of the second epidermal growth factor repeat in Jagged-1. FEBS J 276, 6247-6257 PubMed link
Netotea, S., Bertani, I., Steindler, L., Kerényi, A., Venturi, V., Pongor, S. 2009. A simple model for the early events of quorum sensing in Pseudomonas aeruginosa: modeling bacterial swarming as the movement of an "activation zone". Biology Direct 4, 6 PubMed link
Kuzniar, A., van Ham, R.C.H.J., Pongor, S., Leunissen, J.A.M. 2008. The Quest for Orthologs: Finding Gene Correspondences across Genomes. Trends Genet 24, 539-551 PubMed link
