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ABLeS Participant Centre for Crop and Disease Management - Curtin University

Project title

Advancing bioinformatics, pangenomics and structural proteomics for plant pathology and improvement

Collaborators and funding

Contact(s)

Kristina Gagalova, CCDM, Curtin University, kristina.gagalova@curtin.edu.au

Project description and aims

Our project investigates structural variation, gene presence–absence patterns, and evolutionary dynamics to understand traits such as disease resistance and environmental adaptation in Australian crops. We integrate with structural bioinformatics and protein modelling (e.g. AlphaFold and ESMFold) to predict how natural variants affect protein structure, stability, and interactions, revealing molecular mechanisms underlying plant–pathogen interactions and stress adaptation.

To support dissemination and accessibility, we also aim to develop interactive structure visualisation tools and a scalable database initially hosting 2,000–5,000 protein and protein–protein interaction models, with future expansion towards >50,000 structures. This platform will include a web application enabling users to explore and interact with pre-generated structural models, alongside integration of a locally hosted large language model (LLM) to facilitate natural-language querying and interpretation of the data.

How is ABLeS supporting this work?

This work is supported through the Production Bioinformatics scheme provided by ABLeS.

Expected outputs enabled by participation in ABLeS

1) Development and release of curated datasets for protein–protein interaction analysis and querying. To be released through the web app described in the project.

2) Comparative evaluation of structural bioinformatics and pangenomics tools, targeting high-impact Q1 journal publications.

3) Development, release, and dissemination of open-source software and computational workflows with Nextflow.

4) The project also supports HDR training outcomes, with an HDR student currently dedicated to the structural bioinformatics component; over the next stages of the project, this work is expected to generate publication-quality analyses leading to 2–3 research papers.


These details have been provided by project members at project initiation. For more information on the project, please consult the contact(s) or project links above.