Dr. Savchenko research is particularly studies the proteins that participate in bacterial adaptation to the changes in a chemical environment. His current research focuses on bacterial one-component systems, which regulate the transcription in response to the presence of different small molecules - effectors. His focus is on the structural and functional characterization of 'orphan' bacterial regulators and their effector binding domains. Dr. Savchenko and his lab have already cloned and purified over 50 potential transcriptional regulators and their EBDs from Escherichia coli, Pseudomonas aeruginosa, and Thermotoga maritima. The structures of six different IclR regulators and one GntR regulator have been determined so far. The purified regulators were also screened for binding against the library of 140 representatives of different classes of cellular metabolites. They have identified several potential effectors and characterized their effect on the activity of the corresponding regulators.

Dr. Savchenko received his Master’s of Science in Molecular Biology at Yerevan State University in Armenia in 1992. He then earned his PhD. in Microbiology and Biochemistry at the Université de Nantes.

From December 2000 Dr. Savchenko has been supervising a team of researchers at the newly created Ontario Centre for Structural Proteomics in Toronto, which concentrates on structural and functional studies of structurally uncharacterized protein families in microbial genomes.