David Ardell

The Ardell Laboratory at UC Merced is a computational biology lab that uses machine learning, data science and multi-scale theoretical models to investigate the evolutionary systems biology of tRNA-protein interactions. We develop bioinformatic methods for next-generation sequencing data to investigate global processes in gene expression, build dynamical models of evolving populations to investigate the origin of cells, computationally analyze genomic data and publish software to predict maps of interaction-determining structures in tRNAs, develop phylogenetic and functional classifiers based on tRNA interaction-determining structures, and investigate tRNA-protein interactions as drug targets in pathogens, with a general goal of better understanding the nature and origin of macromolecular interaction networks and cells.