Sergey Samsonov

Group Leader

Sergey Samsonov graduated in Biophysics at Peter the Great St. Petersburg Polytechnic University (Russia) in 2006. In his MSc Thesis he applied experimental and computational methodology to characterize a potential copper transporter. He obtained his first PhD in 2009 in Bioinformatics at Dresden University of Technology in the group of Structural Bioinformatics under the supervision of Dr. M. Teresa Pisabarro, where he investigated the impact of solvent and effects of fluorination in protein-protein interactions. In 2010 he obtained his second PhD title in the field of Biochemistry at St. Petersburg University for the continuation of his Master Thesis topic on copper metabolism proteins. Since then and until 2017 he was a postdoctoral researcher in the group of Structural Bioinformatics at Dresden University of Technology within the project “Transregio 67: Functional biomaterials for controlling healing processes in bone and skin tissue – from material to clinic”, where he started to work in the field of modeling GAG containing biomolecular systems. In 2017 he received a joint grant from National Centre of Sciences (Poland) and EU Commission within POLONEZ Programme to start his own research group at the University of Gdańsk. In 2018 he obtained the title of dr hab. at the University of Tours (France) (Habilitation à diriger des recherches). In 2019, he received two new grants from National Centre of Sciences (Poland), one of which is within collaborative Programme with German Research Council, both of which represent extension of his GAG modeling studies. His research interests are in approaching the understanding of various aspects of GAG interactions with other biomacromolecules and development of specific methodology for this class of polysaccharides with the assistance of molecular docking, molecular dynamics, free energy calculations and quantum chemistry approaches.

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Jacob Clark

Postdoctoral Researcher

Jacob Clark is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Gdansk working to decipher the sulfation code of glycosaminoglycans, the implications of which are to broaden understanding of their conformational, dynamic, thermodynamic and interactive properties underpinning their vast array of functions in the extracellular matrix. In 2019 he completed his BSc in Neuroscience at the University of Leeds (UK), the final dissertation exploring reactive oxygen species generation and NADH-ubiquinone oxidoreductase in mitochondria. In 2024 he received his PhD in Computational Biophysics from King’s College London (UK) under the supervision of Prof Carla Molteni, where he researched the ligand binding mechanisms of glycine receptors. His area of interest is in the application of computational techniques to expand understanding of biomolecules with a specific focus on ligand-protein interactions using of molecular dynamics, free energy calculations and enhanced sampling methods.

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Annemarie Danielsson

PhD Student

Annemarie is a PhD student at the Laboratory of Molecular Modeling, tasked with the investigation of the specificity of protein-glycosaminoglycan binding using computational approaches alongside participating in the development of these methods. She completed her Bachelor Degree in Bioinformatics at the University of Gdansk and in her Bachelor Thesis examined the influence of the optimization of energy function parameters on the quality of modeling of amino acid side chain interactions obtained using the coarse-grained force field UNRES. Annemarie finished her Master Degree in Bioinformatics in Munich at the Technical University of Munich and the Ludwig-Maximilians University; her Master Thesis was focused on the computational analysis of changes in DNA methylation during pregnancy and postpartum in women with and without exposure to early life stress.

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Marta Pągielska

Master Student

Marta is a Bioinformatics student at the University of Gdańsk. Recent field of study contained MD-based comparative analysis of chondroitin sulfate and dermatan sulfate in terms of possible protein binding differences aimed to decipher GAG “sulfation code”. Currently Marta is working on developing a web- based database of protein-glycosaminoglycan interactions.