News

Welcome to Jose, who is starting as a PhD student between our lab at VUB-VIB and the group of Pol Van Dorpe at KULeuven-IMEC. Jose will work on an exciting project that combines computational protein design and nanoelectronuic technologies.

I'm very grateful to Nature Biotechnology for their career feature! Read about it here: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41587-024-02522-7

We are excited to announce a new collaborative project funded by a bilateral FWO-NSFC grant! The project brings together dye chemistry, de novo protein design and neuroscience expertise of Zhixing Chen (Peking University), Anastassia Vorobieva (Vrije Universiteit Brussel) and Jiayi Dou (ShanghaiTech University) and will deliver designed transmembrane fluorescence-activating proteins with superior photochemical properties. We are grateful to FWO for their support and are looking forward to working on this exciting collaboration. 

David Baker has been awarded the Nobel Prize for his pioneering contributions to protein design! 🎉 Over the course of his career, David has not only pushed the boundaries of what proteins can do—conquering one milestone after another—but also built an amazing global community. We couldn’t think of anyone more deserving of this recognition.

The lab's newest PhD student Thomas has won the best poster prize at the VIB.AI symposium. Great job Thomas! Thomas has graduated from the University of Strasburg and has started his PhD in September 2024, after spending almost one year in our group first as and intern then a Master student. He is not working on adding new structures into TMB nanopore lumens to build functional domains. Earlier this year, Thomas has already had the opportunity to present his poster at the RosettaCon conference in Seattle. Congrats Thomas, and good luck for your PhD research.

We're very proud and happy for our Rosetta REU alumna Marissa Dolorfino, who has won a DOE computer science graduate fellowship to continue for PhD research at the University of Michigan. Congrats Marissa!

Arielle will present part of the project she has been working on at the winter RosettaCon in Boston. It is her first conference talk and we're very excited for her.

This year, Alvaro was selected to present his research both at the RosettaCon Developers meeting in Seattle AND at the Machine Learning for Structural Biology workshop at NeurIPS! Congrats Alvaro!!

In September 2024, we've hosted a protein design training event in Brussels, sponsored by VIB training and conferences. The 25 participants learned to predict the effect of mutations on protein stability, and used AI tools from the RosettaCommons and the HPC from the VSC to design a protein drug to block SarsCov2 attachment to human cells. It was all made possible thanks to the hard work of Andrei Sokolovskii and Thomas Guiziou, who co-developed the training material.

The ERC panel has decided to fund our PoreMaDNeSS project! In the next 5 years, we will develop an assay to assess the stability and folding efficiency of thousands of membrane protein designs in parallel. We will also design protein nanopores to sense small molecules and metabolites. We're very grateful to the ERC for the support and the trust!

Congratulations Ana Maria! Great work, with a beautiful crystal structure.

Arielle Tycko joins us for 9 months as a Fulbright scholar. She graduated from Caltech and is now looking forward to apply protein design to real-world biomedical problems. Welcome, Arielle! We hope you have a great time in Brussels. 

Giacomo was selected and delivered a great talk at the GRC meeting in Barcelona! 

Marissa presented her summer research at the Annual Biomedical Research Conference for Minority Students 2022 (Anaheim, California) and received a best-poster award. Congratulations!!

Alvaro studied at the University of Bristol and will be working on the de novo design of transmembrane proteins binding small-molecules. 

We are very grateful to the Open Philanthropy foundation and excited to work on this project in collaboration with the group of Lorenzo Giacani at the University of Washington (Seattle, WA). Check-out our first publication together:

B-Cell Epitope Mapping of TprC and TprD Variants of Treponema pallidum Subspecies Informs Vaccine Development for Human Treponematoses
Molini B, Fernandez MC, Godornes C, Vorobieva A, Lukehart SA, Giacani L
Frontiers in Immunology 13, 862491 (2022)
DOI:10.3389/fimmu.2022.862491

Congratulations Thijs!

She studies math and chemistry at Kalamazoo College in Michigan. Welcome Marissa and have a great summer!

He brings in his expertise in engineering transmembrane beta-barrels and nanopores. Good luck Deepak!

We are very excited and grateful to the Federation of European Biochemical Societies (FEBS) for this award. 

Carolin's expertise is in biophysics and MD simulations. She is joining the group to work on the design of new nanopores in collaboration with Oxford Nanopore Technologies. Welcome Carolin!

Giacomo will work on developing high-throughput folding assay for our membrane protein designs. Welcome Giacomo!