Florence Computational Biology Group
Former members
Gian Luigi Garbini joined the Florence Computational Biology Group back in 2022 for two years working on the analysis of microbial communities in the context of the PRIN projects "Microbiome Assembly: A multilevel approach to predict establishment and variation of microbiomes" and "Escaping the ESKAPEs: integrated pipelines for new antibacterial drugs".
Christopher Riccardi joined the Florence Computational Biology Group back in 2020, when he won a research grant for studying transcription regulatory networks in Antarctic bacteria. After completion of the grant under the supervision of Marco Fondi, in 2021 he applied for and won the 37° cycle PhD position in Evolutionary Biology and Ecology. His area of research revolves around microbial adaptation to environmental changes, metabolic homeostasis, genomic features and adaptations, gene organization and transfer, and biotechnological applications of microorganisms. His best efforts are now channeled towards two main projects: (1) the optimization of our software, MeDuSa, for the scaffolding of eukaryotic contigs and (2) the characterization of a horizontally transferred cassette involved in quorum sensing. He is also actively contributing to multiple side projects, which include the study of genetic variation in conditional mutants of Pseudomonas aeruginosa and the detection of genomic rearrangements using ONT sequencing data in Acinetobacter venetianus. In his free time, he likes to play piano and guitar, travel, read and stay active.
George DiCenzo joined the group from 2017 to 2019 and focused his research on systems biology of S. meliloti metabolism. We developed an improved reconstruction of its metabolism and performed simulations on the role of the different replicons in various ecological niches. He developed pipelines for the integration of Tn-seq data into genome scale metabolic reconstructions, culminating in the TnCore toolbox. Now at Queen's University
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Marco Galardini now at Twincore
Marco joined our group for his PhD at the University of Florence and a few years of post doc. He mainly worked on analysis pipeline development (Contiguator, DuctApe, MeDuSa) and comparative genomics of S. meliloti strains. He devoted his computational skills to most of the projects of the group. He is now research group leader at TwinCore.
Emanuele Bosi, now Researcher at the University of Genova
Emanuele joined our group for his PhD at the University of Florence and a few years of post doc afterwards. During this period he developed MeDuSa and worked on many other projects of the group. He performed genome-scale metabolic modelling and comparative genomics of representatives of many bacterial species. He is now Associate Professor at the University of Genova.