Patrick Aloy

Institut de Recerca Biomèdica de Barcelona (IRB Barcelona)

Life & Medical Sciences

Dr Patrick Aloy is an ICREA Research Professor and Principal Investigator of the Structural Systems Biology lab at the IRB. He has a BSc in Biochemistry and a MSc in Biotechnology from the Univ. Autònoma de Barcelona, Spain, and spent six years as postdoctoral researcher and staff scientist at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory, Heidelberg, Germany. For fifteen years, Dr Aloy has been developing and implementing new technologies and algorithms, applying state-of-the-art methods to specific problems and bridging the gap between theoretical models and experiments in different disciplines. In the last years, he has pioneered system-scale analyses of macromolecular assemblies and networks using high-resolution three-dimensional structures, which has become a new discipline in structure prediction. Dr Aloy has over 100 publications in first-rate journals, with over 8500 citations and remarkable press coverage, illustrating the scientific and social impact of the work.


Research interests

The main goal of my laboratory is to combine computational and structural biology with interaction discovery experiments to unveil the basic wiring architecture of physio-pathological pathways. It is our believe that a deeper knowledge of the global topology of interactome networks related to human disease will have important bearings in the discovery of new drug targets and biomarkers, optimisation of preclinical models and understanding how biological networks change from the healthy state to disease.

Selected publications

– Sfriso P, Duran-Frigola M et al. 2016, ‘Residues Coevolution Guides the Systematic Identification of Alternative Functional Conformations in Proteins’, Structure, 24:1-116-126.

– Kumar A et al. 2016, ‘Conditional Epistatic Interaction Maps Reveal Global Functional Rewiring of Genome Integrity Pathways in Escherichia coli’, Cell Reports, 14, 3, 648 – 661.

– Yang X et al. 2016, ‘Widespread expansion of protein interaction capabilities by alternative splicing’, Cell., 164, 4, 805 – 817.

– Herrando-Grabulosa M et al. 2016, ‘Novel Neuroprotective Multicomponent Therapy for Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis Designed by Networked Systems’, Plos One, 11, 1, e0147626.

– Gomez-Verjan JC et al. 2016, ‘Risk assessment of Soulatrolide and Mammea (A/BA plus A/BB) coumarins from Calophyllum brasiliense by a toxicogenomic and toxicological approach’, Food And Chemical Toxicology, 91, 117 – 129.

– Serra-Musach J et al. 2016, ‘Cancer network activity associated with therapeutic response and synergism’, Genome Medicine, 8, 88.

– Zhong Q et al. 2016, ‘An inter-species protein-protein interaction network across vast evolutionary distance’, Molecular Systems Biology, 12, 4, 865.

– Yachie N et al. 2016, ‘Pooled-matrix protein interaction screens using Barcode Fusion Genetics’, Molecular Systems Biology, 12, 4, 863.

– van Leeuwen J, Pons C et al. 2016, ‘Exploring genetic suppression interactions on a global scale’, Science, 354, 6312, 599 – +.