Info
Alejandro Sánchez Cano
Work address
Group Biosystems Data Analysis, University of Amsterdam
Science Park 904, Room C2-203, 1098 XH, Amsterdam
E-mail: a.sanchez@uva.nl
Websites:
https://www.uva.nl/en/profile/s/a/a.sanchez-cano/a.sanchez-cano.html
Github: AlejandroSanchezCano
Professional Career
Alejandro (Alex) Sánchez received a BSc degree in Biotechnology at the Polytechnic University of Madrid (UPM), with a specialization on plant biotechnology. In 2024, he completed a MSc degree in Bioinformatics at Wageningen University & Research (WUR). During the programme, he did an internship at EV Biotech developing a database to harmonize genome-scale metabolic models (GSMs) from different sources. Afterwards, he continued working as a bioinformatician running GSMs for several fermentation projects and consulting on the technical decision-making. His MSc thesis focused on the determination of molecular patterns driving enzymatic properties of the LPMO family using a structural-based machine learning approach. Currently, Alejandro is a PhD student in the SILS Biosystems Data Analysis group researching plant protein-protein interactions with machine learning.
Research
My line of research is fundamented on developing machine learning models that predict protein-protein interactions (PPIs) and using them to understand the molecular mechanisms that drive them. Specifically, I focus on the PPI prediction of plant transcription factor families such as the MADS-box family. I use structural as well as sequence information to derive features that can be fed into machine learning models. Currently, I investigate the use of contact maps and embedding representations:
Prediction of PPIs from contact maps derived from protein embedding representations using a protein language model (pLM)