Pr Peter Clote is an American-French professor from the Boston College department of Biology, with a continuing courtesy appointment in Computer Science. He is the first Digiteo chairholder and will be employed part-time from 1st June 2008 up to four years.
He is going to cooperate with two Digiteo teams :
Peter Clote is especially interested in the development of new thermodynamics-based algorithms to better understand RNA. The project team will involve at least 3 postdoctoral students and 4 doctoral students during 4 years.
It is now understood that RNA is pervasively expressed in the human genome, with approximately 15 % of genomic DNA being transcribed, much of it into RNA of no known function, while mRNA, tRNA, rRNA and small RNAs account only for a fraction of the total human transcriptome.
Despite the fact that RNA is now understood to be of central importance to molecular biology and genetics, relatively few tools currently exists for RNAomics, especially when compared to the plethora of structural biology tools for genomics and proteomics. The Digiteo chair project addresses this need by creating thermodynamic-based algorithms for the investigation of RNA conformational change, kinetic and mutational folding landscape, with application to riboswitches and to disentanglement of chemical footprinting data.
