Distill@UCD

Protein structure prediction is an important concern in current bioinformatics and functional genomic research because of it far reaching biomedical applications such as its potential for providing an insight into protein mis-folding related diseases such as Alzheimer disease and Creutzfeld Jacobs syndrome, and informing the design of novel drugs to treat such conditions.

Distill is a suite of servers that offer protein structure prediction, which has been developed by Dr.Gianluca Pollastri and other members of the AmMBio group at CSI UCD. It provides fast, accurate comparative modelling of protein structures, and is the most popular secondary structure prediction method now used in the world. It has 80+ corporate users which include half of the top 50 Pharmaceutical/Biotech companies.

Since the AmMBio group's formation in 2004, they have received over €1.1M in funding from a range of sources: Science Foundation Ireland, IRCSET, and the Health Research Board (HRB) and Microsoft Research. There work has been published in a number of leading journals: Bioinformatics, BMC Bioinformatics, Nucleic Acids Research, Journal of Molecular Biology; and have accumulated 1,167 Google Scholar citations. They also continue to collaborate with a number of prestigious institutions such as UniPd, UniFi, UMiss, UCIrvine, UCDavis, UHebei, UniTn, CNR and Columbia University.