Group Main Research Fields

  • Protein sequence analysis
  • Prediction of protein secondary structure and of membrane protein topology with machine learning approaches
  • Protein folding prediction from aminoacid sequence: statistical potentials, contact maps for 3D structure prediction, distance geometry, recognition of nucleation sites, prediction of disulfide bridges with neural networks, prediction of the topology of membrane proteins, model building by homology, threading.
  • Structural and functional annotation of proteomes
  • Annotation of gene and protein variants
  • Protein-protein and protein-nucleic acids interaction networks

Tools based on NN and NN/HMM in Bologna can predict:

  • The secondary structure of proteins
  • The initiation sites of protein folding
  • The topology of all-alpha and all-beta membrane proteins (SGI Best Paper Award at ISMB 2002)
  • The presence of signal peptides
  • The bonding state of cysteines and the topology of disulfide bridges
  • The contact map of proteins (Best performing predictor in the category at CASP4 and CASP5)
  • The protein-protein interaction surfaces
  • The protein stability upon mutation