Research activity is directed to study the behaviour of normal and pathological eukaryotic cells in culture, in terms of migration patterns and proliferation rates. In vitro cultured cells are studied by complementing dynamic microscopy with image analysis and quantitative and statistical evaluation. Experimental studies are associated with an effort to develop advanced analysis tools, useful to support investigation. Computational analysis of experimental data is combined with molecular and cellular approaches aimed to identify the characteristics of the biological phenomena and numerically describe and predict the involved processes. With this approach, a new model was developed, which describes cell movement as a combination of three components, a randomly directed vector, an intrinsic directional persistence and an optional bias vector, typically generated in response to external factors such as chemioattractant gradients or a wound stimulus. Using the model to described the movement of a set of experimental cultures, moving under different conditions, led to the understanding that most cell lines and populations tend to adhere to movement patterns which characterise them enough to differentiate them from each other. 

This model, extended to predict the movement of cells in a range of experimental conditions and combined with a cell cycle model, was used as a base for the development of a simulation system, SimulCell, which can predict the behaviour of eukaryotic cell populations cultured in vitro. The simulation system works by simulating cells as single entities which individually use models of growth, proliferation and migration to determine the behaviour of each of them. This approach makes SimulCell able to produce synthetic populations, which strongly resemble their experimental counterpart and react similarly in different experimental contexts.

Another line focuses on the analysis of “high-throughput” sequencing data, and recently produced a de novo assembled mammalian genome (Bubalus bubalis), with depth and quality that surpass the current reference assembly for this species. Also in this case, the work led to the development of a new tool, able to support comparative evaluation of eukaryotic genomes and graphical visualisation of the alignment of long chromosomes.