Exciting opportunity for Marko Babić at EMBL-EBI

The Mechanism and Catalytic Site Atlas (M-CSA) offers summer internships to biochemists that are willing to curate their database with exciting new mechanisms of how individual enzymes work and which of their numerous amino acid residues directly acts in the chemistry of its catalytic function.

Our master project student Marko Babić has been offered a 3 month intership at the European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI) where he will be learning about newly discovered enzymatic mechanisms to insert into an ever-growing database. The database is aimed to help researchers quickly find a trove of information on the active sites of enzymes and their mechanisms.

Great meeting today

We exchanged our ideas on enyzmes, catalytic triads and ways of studying them, with colleagues from EMBL-EBI (The European Bioinformatics Institute), Dr. Antonio Ribeiro and Ioannis Riziotis. Marko Babić presented his master thesis progress and opened up the floor for a fruitfull discussion.

Great result for Erik and his Arithmetic terror team in HashCode competition

Erik participated in this year’s HashCode in the team with two of his colleagues under the name “Arithmetic terror”. They managed to get the score of 9,439,481 and take the first place in their hub (University of Rijeka). Globally they were 1295th out of 9004 teams that participated and on country scale, they were 8th in Croatia.

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HashCode is a global team-based (2-4 participants) programming competition organized by Google. It is primarily intended for engineering students, however anyone is free to participate and try to solve real-world problems. HashCode starts with a qualification round in which a single problem is presented with multiple test cases. Only the best qualified teams will be invited to take the part in the final round. Unlike other programming contests, HashCode’s distinctiveness is that there is not only a single valid solution to the given problem. This is what makes HashCode so exciting: to find the best possible solution. This year, the goal was to optimize the schedule of traffic lights to minimize the total amount of time required for cars to get to their destination. Shortly put, contestants were given a list of streets in the city, how they are interconnected and how long does it take to travel each of these streets. They were also given a list of rides in that city and each car wants to get to its destination as soon as possible. For each completed ride a team would get a fixed score and a bonus depending on how quickly the ride was over. Participants had 4 hours to find a solution to the given problem.

 

Presentation @ UNIRI COVID-19 symposium

Today, Assistant Professor Goran Mauša took part in the Stem for Human Species Survival section of the symposium COVID-19 Messages: On the Pandemic from Five Perspectives, with the presentation “Application of soft computing in peptide design. This work is included in the DeShPet project funded by the Croatian Science Foundation (HRZZ) and the uCroTrap project founded by the University of Rijeka. A big thanks to the University of Rijeka for the invitation to participate in this nice event and for recognizing our interdisciplinary research.

Growing strong

After almost two years of deshpeting as master students, Erik Otović and Marko Njirjak became members of our computational branch of DeShPet team. Erik joined us through HRZZ Young Researchers’ Career Development Project and Marko as assistant at Faculty of Engineering.

Welcome guys and happy PhDing!