Ricerca LaboratoriComBoCurrent team membersFormer members

Former members

Christopher Riccardi joined the Florence Computational Biology Group back in 2020, when he won a research grant for studying transcription regulatory networks in Antarctic bacteria. After completion of the grant under the supervision of Marco Fondi, in 2021 he applied for and won the 37° cycle PhD position in Evolutionary Biology and Ecology. His area of research revolves around microbial adaptation to environmental changes, metabolic homeostasis, genomic features and adaptations, gene organization and transfer, and biotechnological applications of microorganisms. His best efforts are now channeled towards two main projects: (1) the optimization of our software, MeDuSa, for the scaffolding of eukaryotic contigs and (2) the characterization of a horizontally transferred cassette involved in quorum sensing. He is also actively contributing to multiple side projects, which include the study of genetic variation in conditional mutants of Pseudomonas aeruginosa and the detection of genomic rearrangements using ONT sequencing data in Acinetobacter venetianus. In his free time, he likes to play piano and guitar, travel, read and stay active.

Github: https://github.com/chrisondakeys

Thanh-Son Dang (Agronomy Major at AgroSup Dijon, France) joined our team in 2022 for an intership on the modelling of S. meliloti in response to different root exudates. For this, he integrated metabolomic data with genome-scale metabolic modelling.

Gabriel Innocenti obtained a Master Degree in Cellular and Molecular Biology at the University of Florence. His main research interests are related to comparative genomics, metagenomics and dynamics of gene evolution. His actual interest is related to the application of bioinformatics approaches, including scripting and programming, for the analysis of NGS and Omics data (e.g. RNA-Seq, WGS).

Mikołaj Dziurzynski is a PhD student in the Drewniak and Dziewit research group and currently a visiting researcher in our lab. He's training period is supported by a COMNAP (Council of Managers of National Antarctic Program) and a FEMS fellowship. He is currently studying the interdependencies between metabolism and heavy metal resistance in the Antarctic bacterium Pseudoalteromonas haloplanktis TAC125, combining transcriptomics data with in silico, genome-scale metabolic modelling.

George DiCenzo joined the group from 2017 to 2019 and focused his research on systems biology of S. meliloti metabolism. We developed an improved reconstruction of its metabolism and performed simulations on the role of the different replicons in various ecological niches. He developed pipelines for the integration of Tn-seq data into genome scale metabolic reconstructions, culminating in the TnCore toolbox. Now at Queen's University

Luana Presta joined our group for her PhD. She worked on many aspects of microbial genomics and constraint-based metabolic modelling. She completed the genome-scale metabolic reconstruction of A. baumannii ATCC19606 and, by integrating the model with transcriptoimcs data, she derived putative candidates for fighting colistin-resistance
.

Marco Galardini now at Twincore

Marco joined our group for his PhD at the University of Florence and a few years of post doc. He mainly worked on analysis pipeline development (Contiguator, DuctApe, MeDuSa) and comparative genomics of S. meliloti strains. He devoted his computational skills to most of the projects of the group.

Emanuele Bosi, now Researcher at the University of Genova

Emanuele joined our group for his PhD at the University of Florence and a few years of post doc afterwards. During this period he developed MeDuSa and worked on many other projects of the group. He performed genome-scale metabolic modelling and comparative genomics of representatives of many bacterial species.

Florence Computational Biology Group

Former members

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