TEACHERS AND RESEARCHERS

Bioinformatics is becoming part of research basically at every Department at the Biological Institute and also at some of Departments of the Physical Institute. Genomics, transcriptomics and proteomics data are used to understand basic biological processes underlying neurological development and diseases, the origin of immune response and antibiotic resistance or to explore the microbiome of water and soil. They develop novel computational tools to identify cancer mutations, understand the structural and functional properties of proteins and interpret the effect of mutations. Theoretical and bioinformatic studies carried out at the University help to understand basic evolutionary events. Bioinformatics is a key component of a project at our university that aims to find new biomarkers for various diseases, such as rheumatoid arthritis, cancer or neurodegenerative diseases.

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Zsuzsanna Dosztányi

(Head of specialization)


Department of Biochemistry

Webpage
She performs bioinformatic studies on intrinsically disordered proteins and protein structures in order to understand how structural properties are related to function, and how perturbation can lead to diseases. Her current research is mainly focused on protein-protein interactions mediated through linear binding motifs. She is the author of various highly-cited bioinformatics tools (such as IUPred, ANCHOR) and is involved in the development and maintenance of several databases and prediction tools. She won the Momentum Grant in 2014.
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Eszter Ari

Department of Genetics

Webpage
She studies evolution from a genomic and bioinformatics perspective. In collaboration with the Biological Research Centre of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences at Szeged, using a set of metagenomics tools she studies how antibiotic resistance appears and spreads in a bacterial population. She is also developing a functional enrichment analyser algorithm and R package.
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Ádám Kun

Department of Ecology

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He is a theoretical evolutionary biologist studying the origin of life and the origin and evolution of cooperation. He has a formal training in computer science and teaches computer programming for biologist since 1999. He has learnt bioinformatics from Pauline Hogeweg, the researcher coining the term.
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Zoltán Gáspári

Department of Ecology

Webpage
He studies the structural and dynamical properties of proteins with both experimental and computational methods. His current focus is on proteins involved in postsynaptic signal transduction. He uses structure modelling and prediction tools as well as calculations that incorporate experimental parameters derived from NMR measurements.
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Gergely Szöllősi

Department of Ecology

Webpage
His research is best described as “model based evolutionary genomics” and is based on the recognition that our understanding of biological systems is often limited not by the lack of data, but by our ability to extract information from already available large scale datasets. The aim is to develop a coherent treatment of evolutionary process at different time scales, from the diversification of species over hundreds of millions of years, to the decade long development of tumours. Dr Szöllősi’s research currently focuses on two topics that are the subject of intense international interest, each aiming to extract quantitative information on the underlying biological processes from large genomic datasets: 1. reconstructing a dated tree of life from complete genomes using phylogenetic discord as molecular fossils and 2. understanding cancer evolution in hierarchically differentiating tissue using tumour genomes.