I'm Sergio. Research Officer and Bioinformatician at Inouye Lab, in the Baker Institute.

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About Me

I carried out my MSc and PhD in Barcelona (Barril Lab), where I worked with different structure-based drug design methods with the aim to improve drug design for non-standard targets. Mainly, I was involved in the development and application of virtual screening approaches using molecular docking and other complementary methods.
After finishing my PhD in 2017, I stayed in the same lab performing different collaborative projects in the field of epigenetics and cancer, with the aim of finding bioactive compounds targeting “undruggable” proteins.

I also carried out two short stays in the labs of Dr Andreas Bender (Cambridge, UK) and Dr Peter Kolb (Marburg, Germany), where I learnt about genomics and other computational methods.

I joined the Baker Institute in January 2019 as a Research Officer in the Systems Genomics lab, under the supervision of professors Mike Inouye and Agus Salim. My research interests are broad and involve mainly the relationship between genetic variants and their effect on protein structures.

I am currently established in Melbourne.

Research
Selected Projects

Dynamic Undocking

Dynamic Undocking (DUck) is a new fast computational method that evaluates structural stability by calculating the work necessary to break the most important native contacts (hydrogen bonds) in a ligand-receptor complex. This property is effective in distinguishing true ligands from decoys and is orthogonal to currently existing docking methods, thus making it exceptionally useful in virtual screening.

rDock Docking

rDock is a fast and versatile Open Source docking program that can be used to dock small molecules against proteins and nucleic acids. It is designed for High Throughput Virtual Screening (HTVS) campaigns and Binding Mode prediction studies.
It is mainly written in C++ and accessory scripts and programs are written in C++, perl or python languages.

Previous
Postdoctoral Researcher at Xavier Barril Lab
2017-2018
EMBO and MuTaLig Short Term Fellowships
Short-term fellow at Bender and Kolb Labs
2017
A/Prof with classes in Pharmacy and Nutrition degrees
2015-2018
PhD candidate at Xavier Barril Lab
2012-2016