About Eu-Sol
Find out more about this project.
An introduction to the aims of EU-SOL and how we plan to achieve them. Plus read about the organisations and people working on this project.
IT: UNINA
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Full name: Faculty of Agriculture, University Federico II of Naples
Location: Naples, Italy
About Us
The University of Naples Federico II was established in 1224. It was the first laical university funded in Europe. The university is made up of three divisions, the Division of Science and Technology includes; The Division of Life Sciences; The Division of Social and Human Sciences.
The Department of Soil, Plant, Environment and Animal Production Sciences, whose people are involved in the EU-SOL Project, is part of the Division of the Life Sciences. Among the major activities in the department, plant genetics and breeding are some of the most relevant. In particular different areas can be distinguished: operations and equipment related to molecular biology; in vitro culture, cytogenetics, biometrics and image analysis; bioinformatics. For plant cultivation, the group has the use of experimental fields of the Faculty of Agriculture as well as of other public and private organizations.
UNINA and Eu-Sol
The group from UNINA is involved in the EU-SOL for Bioinformatics aspect. It is working in Module 6, “Bioinformatics for integrated Solanaceae research”, contributing to two different workpackages, 6.1 and 6.3.
The group will support the computer analysis of the Tomato genome, which is going to be defined in all its components (Tomato genome sequencing effort) thanks to an international effort in which the EU-SOL partners are the major participants. The interpretation of a sequenced genome is the necessary step to understand its structure properties and its functionality. It is based on computational approaches and is rendered through suitable databases and software. Computational analysis must be appropriately tuned for the genome under investigation, this requires the implementation of the most accurate software methodologies. This effort is distributed among the different bioinformatics partners which the UNINA group is part of.
The UNINA group is involved in the maintainance of the expressed sequences from the genome (called cDNAs or ESTs), data necessary for the required set up of the software. In particular, the group collects these data for different Solanaceae species in the form of databases, providing the information to the whole community in a suitable and biologially meaningful way.
The group from UNINA is also implementing methodologies for comparative analysis within the whole Solanaceae family. Moreover, because the italian goup set up an Italian Computational Platform for Solanaceae genomics called ISOLA thanks also to national fundings, they will provide their data collection to set up a “one stop shop” web service, in collaboration with all the other bioinformatic groups within the EU-Sol project, i.e. a collection of information from different servers located and mantained in different countries but visible through one unique web site.
Staff (working on EU-SOL)
- Dr. Maria Luisa Chiusano, Staff Scientist Molecular Biology/Bioinformatics
- Prof. Luigi Frusciante, Full Professor of Plant Genetics Plant Genetics
- Prof. Amalia Barone, Associate Professor of Plant Genetics Plant Molecular Genetics
- Dr. Maria Raffaella Ercolano, Staff Scientist Plant Molecular Genetics
- Dr. Nunzio D’Agostino, Post Doc
- Dr. Alessandra Traini, PhD student Bioinformatics
- Mario Aversano, Informatics Technician
