The Department of Bioinformatics & Structural Biochemistry was funded in 1999 by Andrei-Jose Petrescu who is also professor and PhD Coordinator at the School of Advenced Strudies of the Romanian Academy, SCOSAAR.
Since 1999 the initial group has functioned and gradually increased into the current structure of the Department aiming to consistently implement computational biology techniques in the realm of bioinformatics, systems biology, modeling & simulation - and use them to guide experimental research in molecular biology and biochemistry. Of the current 2 groups Andrei's one continued working on structural bioinformatics - investigating in the 2000-2010's glycoprotein folding and degradation, the relation between glycosylation and glycoprotein's structure and more generally studying the biophysical aspects of protein folding and structure.
Currently, the group develops techniques in this field and applies them to a variety of problems in structura biology with a significant focuss on immunobiology and molecular medicine.
In 2012, Adina Milac (d. 2019), returned to DBSB from the National Institute of Health, NIH Bethesda, USA, where she carried out two PostDoc stages in Lawrence Tabak's and Robert Guy's lab. Adina brought in fresh molecular modeling and simulation techniques and new research topics related to structure-function relation in ion-channel systems and drug-design. In 2016, Laurentiu Spiridon, also returned from a PostDoc at the Illinois Institute of Thechnology in David Minh Lab. Laur has brought in new Free-Energy computational methods that we are currently using in ligand screening and drug design. Since his return Laur has actively worked to develop a new generation of Gibbs sampling techniques based on robotic algorithms that have been implemented in the Robosample simulation platform. Another research direction we pursue is led by Dr. Cristian Munteanu who focused on coupling computational techniques with Mass Spectrometry, Surface Plasmon Resonance and data derived from the high-throughput Drug Screening Platform of the Institute, aiming to step up the scale of biological system investigation to the global proteome and interactome level.
Since 2016, DBSB greatly increased its size, with the addition of the Computational and Systems Biology of Ageing Group led by Robi Tacutu, also a DBSB alumni, returning to the Institute from the University of Liverpool, UK. Robi's group is developing and using bioinformatics tools and omics data to better understand the ageing process and age-related diseases. Robi's group has a strong multidisciplinary background, mixing gerontology, bioinformatics and machine learning techniques in order to analyze large amounts of data from heterogenous high-throughput technologies and from a wide variety of OMICS.
Along the years DBSB was the recipient of 3 Romanian Academy Awards:
Romanian Academy Award "Nicolae Simionescu" 1998 - Petrescu A.J. for "Contributions in Protein Folfing Research"
Romanian Academy Award "Grigore Antipa" 2017 - Spiridon L. for "Development of Highly Efficient Simulation Methods for Biolgical Systems at Molecular Level"
Romanian Academy Award "Emil Racovita" 2020 - Tacutu R. for "Contributions in the System Biology of Aging"
The department is supported by the computational infrastructure provided by the High Performance Computing Centre, one of the central facilities of the Institute vital to our molecular simulations and bioinformatics analyses consisting in:
12 Biocomputing dedicated Graphic Stations (overall power ~250 TFlops, storage 70 TB)
1 Biocomputing dedicated HP-HPC Cluster (4 TFlop - effective power, storage 16 TB);
4 Systems Biology dedicated storage/analysis servers (overall storage 200 TB)
5 Systems Biology dedicated workstations
1 General use Bull-HPC Cluster
Romanian Academy