Dr. Bonneau has expertise primarily in ab initio protein structure prediction, protein folding, bioinformatics and is currently focused on applying structure prediction and structural information to functional annotation and the modeling/prediction of regulatory and physical networks for Halobacterium sp NRC-1. Dr. Bonneau is also working to develop general methods to solve protein structures and protein complexes with small sets of distance constraints derived from chemical cross-linking.
          Prior to joining the ISB, Dr. Bonneau worked primarily on abinitio protein folding. The problem, simply stated is: given a gene sequence, predict its three dimensional structure. This work was done with Dr. David Baker at the University of Washington and supported partially with a Howard Hughes Medical Institute pre-doctoral Fellowship in the Biological Sciences.
          During the last phase of Dr. Bonneau’s work at the University a crucial and unprecedented milestone was achieved; it was shown that automatically generated Rosetta predictions, made on a genomic scale, were of sufficient quality that they could be used to infer functional information for proteins of unknown structure and function.