Alexandre Bonvin

 

Prof. dr. A.M.J.J. (Alexandre) Bonvin

Professor of Computational Structural Biology and scientific director of the Bijvoet Centre for Biomolecular Research 

Utrecht University

Solving 3D puzzles of biomolecular interactions by integrative modelling

The prediction of the quaternary structure of biomolecular macromolecules is of paramount importance for fundamental understanding of cellular processes and drug design. In the era of integrative structural biology, one way of increasing the accuracy of modelling methods used to predict the structure of biomolecular complexes is to include as much experimental or predictive information as possible in the process.

We have developed for this purpose a versatile information-driven docking approach HADDOCK (https://www.bonvinlab.org/software) available as a web portal from https://wenmr.science.uu.nl. HADDOCK can integrate information derived from biochemical, biophysical or bioinformatics methods to enhance sampling, scoring, or both. The information that can be integrated is quite diverse: Interface restraints from e.g. NMR, mutagenesis experiments, or bioinformatics predictions; shape data from small-angle X-ray scattering and cryo-electron microscopy experiments.

In my talk, I will introduce HADDOCK and illustrate its capabilities with various examples including among others recent work on the inclusion of shape information to drive the modelling process.

Short bio

Alexandre Bonvin (1964) studied Chemistry at Lausanne University, Switzerland and obtained his PhD at Utrecht University in the Netherlands (1993). After two post-doc periods at Yale University (USA) and the ETHZ (CH) he joined Utrecht University in 1998 where he was appointed full professor of computational structural biology in 2009. In 2006, he received a prestigious VICI grant from the Dutch Research Council. He was director of chemical education from February 2009 until February 2012, vice head of the Chemistry Department from 2010 until April 2012 and since September 2019 Scientific Director of the Bijvoet Centre for Biomolecular Research. He is participating to several EU projects including the BioExcel Center of Excellence in Biomolecular Simulations and the European Open Science Cloud Hub and EGI-ACE projects. His work has resulted in over 250 peer-reviewed publications.

ISI Web of Science, author ID: A-5420-2009

Google Scholar Citations

ORCID: http://orcid.org/0000-0001-7369-1322

A full CV can be downloaded here.

Research

Research within the computational structural biology group focuses on the development of reliable bioinformatics and computational approaches to predict, model and dissect biomolecular interactions at atomic level. For this, bioinformatics data, structural information and available biochemical or biophysical experimental data are combined to drive the modelling process. This is implemented and further developed in the widely used HADDOCK software for the modelling of biomolecular complexes (http://bonvinlab.org/software).

By following a holistic approach integrating various experimental information sources with computational structural biology methods we aim at obtaining a comprehensive description of the structural and dynamic landscape of complex biomolecular machines, adding the structural dimension to interaction networks and opening the route to systematic and genome-wide studies of biomolecular interactions.