Biography

Rafael Junqueira Borges, PhD and specialist in Structural Biology, Bioinformatics and Method Development, is a Principal Investigator in the CQMED and the head of LaBEI/CBMEG/UNICAMP. His group integrates experimental and computational methods to understand protein structure and function, focusing on the search for modulators/inhibitors of therapeutic targets in the early phase of drug discovery. His group combines structural biology, biophysical and biochemical assays, mass spectrometry, phylogenetic analysis, structural bioinformatics, chemoinformatics, and artificial intelligence to elucidate structures, complexes, and sequences. We study proteins from natural sources, especially snake venom toxins, and cancer-related targets.

Research Areas

1. The two crystal structures of unloaded and cargo-loaded Vacuolar Sorting Receptor 1 lumenal domain (VSR1-Nt) reveal two cargo binding sites and a mechanism of transport
2. The CCP4 suite: integrative software for macromolecular crystallography
3. SEQUENCE SLIDER: integration of structural and genetic data to characterize isoforms from natural sources
4. SEQUENCE SLIDER: expanding polyalanine fragments for phasing with multiple side-chain hypotheses
5. PLA2-like proteins myotoxic mechanism: a dynamic model description