Dimitrios P. Vlachakis
Agricultural University of Athens, Greece
- Publications: N/A
- Citations: N/A
- Keywords: Genetics, Epigenetics, Bioinformatics, Drug Design, Precision Medicine
Short Bio
- As. Professor Dimitrios P. Vlachakis leads the Genetics and Computational Biology Group at the Genetics Laboratory at the Biotechnology Department of the Agricultural University of Athens. He is a medical biochemist with postgraduate, doctoral and postdoctoral studies in the eminent fields of genetics, medicinal chemistry and drug discovery. Prof Vlachakis has also been appointed as an Affiliated Researcher at the Faculty of Natural and Mathematical Sciences at the King’s College London and as an Adjunct Investigator of the Qatar Genome Programme (QGP) at the Qatar Foundation for Education, Science, and Community Development at Sidra Medicine, Doha, Qatar. Since 2012 Dr. Vlachakis has been serving as the Editor in Chief of the Journal of Molecular Biochemistry and as the deputy editor in chief for EMBnet journal. He was recently elected as the P&PR PC chair of EMBnet. To date, Dr. Vlachakis has published more than 200 original research articles in international peer-reviewed journals with impact factor, numerous articles in international conference proceedings, 9 ISBN books, 5 scientific patents and has been on the receiving end of numerous grants and awards. Our research interests revolve around three distinct, yet intersecting, areas: i) The functional role of long non-coding RNAs, ii) Stress mechanisms and homeostasis via nuclear receptors & iii) Computational and molecular virology. We develop and apply our research to a repertoire of scientific domains. Namely, we have been investigating the role of nuclear receptors in gene expression and regulation and in particular the role of the glucocorticoid receptor in stress. Then, we look into the realm of viruses and in particular into the ssRNA family of flaviviridae and ebola virus for the investigation of the genetic elasticity of viral genomes (antigenic drift/shift) and how epigenetics could annihilate current vaccination protocols. In our lab we use a wide spectrum of methodologies ranging from state-of-the-art bioinformatics, molecular modelling and hypercomputing pipelines to traditional genetic and biochemistry in vitro and in vivo techniques. On one hand, we have developed our own software for machine learning, deep learning and data mining for multimodal fusion of information from genetic, structural and physicochemical analyses. On the other hand, we use DNA engineering, SDM, cloning, expression and protein purification techniques to biologically test and evaluate the validity and reliability of our models.
