Professor Michele Vendruscolo

Interests

My research is aimed at taking full advantage of an approach that exploits effectively the synergy between experiment and theory in order to advance towards a full characterisation of the process of protein aggregation.

We have developed a method (http://www-vendruscolo.ch.cam.ac.uk/zyggregator.php) based on the simple physico-chemical characteristics of the amino acids, that enables predictions to be made about several aspects of the process of peptide and protein aggregation.

We are using this approach to investigate a model of Alzheimer’s disease based on the expression of the Abeta peptide in Drosophila melanogaster as an “in vivo test tube” in which to probe the molecular determinants of protein aggregation and its biological consequences.

We also have recently revealed a very close connection between two important but distinct aspects of the behaviour of proteins in the cell - their aggregation propensities and the expression levels of the corresponding genes

Correlation between mRNA expression levels and the measured aggregation rates of the corresponding proteins.
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Research Focus

Equipment

Computational modelling