Dr Teodora Mateeva

Senior Bioinformatician

 
I'm a Senior Bioinformatician specializing in bacterial capsules. I am currently working on a project aiming to map the bacterial capsule diversity across all species and use that knowledge to train Machine Learning models to predict the presence and type of capsule from genomic data.

My research 

Many bacteria have an extracellular structure positioned outside of the peptidoglycan cell envelope, commonly referred to as a capsule. Bacterial capsules can have a complex and varying composition being made of: polysaccharides, polypeptides, and combinations of both. Capsules are synthesized in both Gram-positive and Gram-negative bacteria, and the composition and structure are determined by the synthesis pathway employed/capsule genes. Due to the importance of the capsule as a virulence factor, it has gained a lot of attention in the field of vaccination. However, there is little in-depth research of the capsule diversity across all species, particularly the capsule diversity in non-pathogenic bacteria.

In my work, I perform large-scale analysis of the structural and sequence diversity of proteins taking part in different capsule synthesis pathways. I currently develop ML-based and physics-based methods to learn more about the molecular evolution of the capsule machinery across different bacterial species. My current focus is also on the catalytic mechanism elucidation of glycoenzymes across a range of species. I am very interested in specific cases where mutations affect protein function and implicate capsule synthesis.

My timeline