Alejandro Giorgetti, PhD

Alejandro Giorgetti obtained his bachelor’s degree in physics at the 'Universidad Nacional del Sur', Bahia Blanca, Argentina. He obtained a Ph.D. in Physical and Statistical Biology at the International School for Advanced Studies (SISSA), Trieste, Italy. After that, he spent three years in the Biocomputing lab. at the Universidad di Roma 'La Sapienza'. Nowadays, Alejandro Giorgetti is an Associate Professor of biochemistry at the University of Verona, Italy since 2018. Since his arrival as an assistant professor at the Department of Biotechnology (2007), he has been the Principal Investigator of the group 'Laboratory of Applied Bioinformatics'.  I collaborate with the Institute for Advanced Simulation (IAS) / Institute of Neuroscience and Medicine (INM) (Computational Biomedicine (IAS-5/INM-9)) of the research center: Forschungszentrum Jülich, Germany. His principal activities regard protein structural bioinformatics and computational biophysics aimed at understanding the molecular mechanisms underlying the interaction of membrane chemo and neuro-receptors with their cognate ligands. He has published 100 peer-reviewed articles and several book chapters. Among other journals, he is a member of the editorial board of Scientific Reports (Nature Group).

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Structural Neuroinformatics

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Apply, create, and maintain web-accessible databases of experimental and computational data, together with innovative software tools, essential for understanding the structure/function of proteins expressed in the nervous system in its normal function and neurological disorders. Structural Neuroinformatics compresses data obtained by traditional structural bioinformatics of proteins expressed in the brain, combined with computational biophysics calculations performed on wild-type proteins together with proteins modified in relation to brain functioning/malfunctioning.

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• Receptors involved in chemoperception: Bitter taste receptors and olfactory receptors.

• Development of multiscale approaches aimed at gaining insights into the structure-function of receptors of neurobiological interest: pyGOMoDo for modelling and docking of GPCR receptors and the coarse-grained/molecular mechanics (MM/CG) hybrid approach; MERMAID web-server for preparing and running CGMD simulations of membrane proteins.

• The Structural Systems Biology (SSB platform) for bridging in silico molecular description of synaptic receptors with a systems biology level description of the signaling mechanisms