WELCOME

Bioinformatics is one of the areas of Scientific Research currently expanding where pattern recognition techniques can found application. We are sure that many GIRPR researchers have software tools that could be used in this area and We invite all of you who are potentially interested to contact Alessandro Gaggia (alessandro.gaggia@unipv.it).

The group aims to study approaches, strategies and potential of Pattern Recognition techniques in Bionformatics and Computational Biology. Especially but not exclusively, in proteomics - where the morphology is of substantial importance for the function of proteins themselves - the modeling of the surface, comparison of protein structures, research configurations of common classes of proteins and search for similarities in protein databases, can be addressed effectively through PR techniques.

These studies represent a natural continuation of those carried out successfully in various application areas of traditional PR and Vision. Indeed, from an analysis not exhaustive but large enough, it appears that different approaches that have not been followed (or were only followed very partially) can improve significantly the results currently available. A list of open issues on which you can operate effectively is:

• Protein retrieval in a database
• Alignment and comparison of two proteins
• All-to-all comparison and structural research of common motifs or domains
• Classification of known structures
• Morphological study of the interaction between proteins and other molecules (docking between proteins and between a protein and a ligand)
• Using known structures to predict structural sequences of amino acids (protein threading, the problem of folding, etc.)
• Prediction of links between protein molecules and potential drugs
• Search in a library of drugs for the selection - always based on morphology - of proteins that interact