This is the Way
DeShPet lab members Daniela and Goran participated at the 60th Japanese Peptide Symposium held in Otsu (Japan) with two oral presentations on the topic of catalytic peptides and challenges of applying ML to the prediction of active peptides. It was a great experience and opportunity to network with Japanese and international scientists.
DeShPet team members had a lot of fun organizing, presenting their results and networking at the Peptide Chemistry Day held in Zagreb at the beautiful SEECEL building. It was a great day and we hope to have more of this opportunities in the future. It was nice to have our friend and collaborator Antonella Bandiera from the University of Trieste as invited speaker.
Read our latest paper published in Molecular Systems Design & Engineering (MSDE), studying the factors influencing catalytic activity of metal-dependent histidine-rich peptides, selected as HOT article. Congrats Patrizia and the team for this great article for which Marko Babić designed the inside front cover.
Marko Babić attended AFFINITY2023 – The 25th meeting of the International Society for Molecular Recognition conference, where he presented a flash talk entitled 
“Modeling the aggregation of self-assembling histidine rich peptides in the presence of zinc(II) ions” and had a nice opportunity to network with colleagues and friends. It was a nice opportunity to visit Portugal.
Patrizia participated at the SupraChemDays 2023 held in Cagliari with the presentation “Elucidating the role of amino acid disposition, cyclization and chirality on self-assembly propensity and catalytic activity of histidine-rich peptides” where she presented her latest results on short catalytic peptides. 
Proud to share that Daniela, our team leader, won the Invited Lecturer Presentation Award at the MRS Spring Meeting in San Francisco. It has been a great experience and opportunity for sharing our results and interacting with leaders in the field of peptide materials! For someone starting their path as PI this is a great recognition. Thanks to the whole #deshpet team for working hard to make it possible. #MRSspring #SB06 #peptides #ML #team
Our master student Ena together with Matea, Valentina and Alberta that attended out elective course Nanochemistry, participated at the #RSCPoster conference on twitter where they presented their work on the topic on Lactose intolerance and the possibility to design short peptides able to catalyse lactose hydrolysis. The projects were designed and supervised by PhD students Patrizia and Marko, well done!
Lactase – inspired design of short peptides #RSCPoster #RSCChemBio #RSCCat pic.twitter.com/TaifeOH5gQ
— Ena Dražić (@DrazicEna) February 28, 2023
Lactase supplement analysis and future endeavors #RSCPoster #RSCChemBio #RSCCat pic.twitter.com/y4AmXL6Kvp
— Matea Krsanac (@krsanac_matea) February 28, 2023
Marko Babić attended the 6th International PhD Conference – Digitalization in Science and Society, held in Ljubljana (Slovenia) where he presented a poster presentation about his experience with writing a paper using open-access databases and software. Marko provided arguments for science digitalization using his research as an example. The participation at the conference was supported by the Doctoral School at the University of Rijeka.
Check out our new paper Esterase Sequence Composition Patterns for the Identification of Catalytic Triad Microenvironment Motifs published in Journal of Chemical Information and Modeling (IF 6.162) in collaboration with Silvia Marchesan where we look for inspiration and patterns in esterases. Congrats Marko Babić on your first paper! This paper is part of the special issue “Advancing Women in Chemistry”.
At the 5th RSC-BMCS / RSC-CICAG Artificial Intelligence in Chemistry, Marko presented his poster entitled Genetic Algorithm-enhanced Parallel Chemical Space Exploration Utilising Multiple Peptide Libraries while Erik was selected to give a pitch talk about his work entitled Transfer Learning for Improved Peptide Activity Prediction on Small Dataset.
