International laboratory of bioinformatics

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The main directions of the laboratory's educational and scientific activities include fundamental research on the role of DNA secondary structures in genome functioning, chromatin organization, and studies of DNA-protein interactions. The laboratory is engaged in deciphering the "code of DNA secondary structures," which, along with the primary annotation code of the genome elements (genes, exons, introns, regulatory motifs, etc.) and the epigenetic code, represents another layer of genome annotation.

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The laboratory also conducts studies on the spatial structure of chromatin, its changes under various experimental influences, and its connection with the epigenetic code and the code of DNA secondary structures. In particular, tasks are set to compare different methods of identifying topologically associating domains (TADs) and to apply deep learning methods to the task of finding characteristic genomic functional elements at TAD boundaries.
 

A separate direction is dedicated to defining the physicochemical properties of DNA structures involved in protein interactions. The laboratory is developing the NPIDB database – an open-access resource for studying DNA-protein interactions, providing a large collection of DNA-protein complexes. The resource extracts and analyzes information from other publicly available well-known bioinformatics databases such as PDB, SCOP, Pfam. Developments are underway on the classification of DNA-protein complexes and solving the problem of assigning new structures to existing structural families.

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By interning at the laboratory, students will be able to immerse themselves in active scientific activities at the early stages of their education. The laboratory collaborates with leading global bioinformatics laboratories.