Higgins Hall 577
Telephone: 617-552-1332
Email: peter.clote@bc.edu
ORCID
Computational biology/bioinformatics, synthetic biology, structural and systems biology, RNA molecular design, kinetics, RNA tertiary structure motifs, macromolecular structure, molecular evolution, machine learning in bioinformatics (neural nets, support vector machines).
RNA plays a wide range of previously unsuspected roles in many biological processes, including retranslation of the genetic code (selenocysteine insertion, ribosomal frameshift transcriptional and translational gene regulation, temperature sensitive conformational switches, chemical modification of specific nucleotides in the ribosome, regulation of alternative splicing, etc.).
Our lab is interested in such questions, especially in the development of new thermodynamics-based algorithms to better understand the folding and folding kinetics of such RNA. We are interested in the computational design of synthetic ribozymes (ribonucleic acid enzymes), synthetic riboswitches (RNAs that regulate genes by allostery), synthetic thermozymes (regulatory RNAs that are triggered by temperature change) and other RNA classes -- work that contributes to synthetic biology, the "wet" analogue of nanotechnology, a field that could be dominant in the 21st century.
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