Csaba Pal

Csaba Pal (born March 27, 1975) is a Hungarian biologist at the Biological Research Centre (BRC) in Szeged Hungary. His laboratory is part of the Synthetic and Systems Biology Unit at BRC. His research is at the interface of evolution, antibiotic resistance and genome engineering and has published over 70 scientific publications in these areas.
==Education==
Csaba Pal completed his Masters in Biology at Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest, in 1998. Four years later he was awarded a Doctor of Philosophy degree from the Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest in 2002. In 2018 he received a Doctor of Science degree from the Hungarian Academy of Sciences.
Csaba Pal spent several years abroad with scholarships. He had the opportunity to research in Bath, Oxford, Heidelberg and Italy. Prior to his return to Hungary in 2008, he worked as a visiting scientist at the University of Trento.
==Career and Research==
Csaba Pal works on fundamental and applied problems in the evolution of genomes networks and antibiotic resistance. To achieve these goals, he develops methods in systems biology, computational metabolic modelling and genome engineering.
==Genome evolution==
In 2001, Csaba Pal and colleagues demonstrated that highly expressed genes in yeast evolve slowly. Later, they argued that evolutionary rate of a protein is predominantly influenced by its expression level rather than functional importance. This research has contributed to a paradigmatic shift in the field of protein evolution. Balazs Papp, Csaba Pal, and Laurence Hurst studied molecular mechanisms underlying dosage sensitivity. They specifically tested what is now known as the dosage balance hypothesis. The hypothesis offers a synthesis on seemingly unrelated problems such as the evolution of dominance, gene duplicability and co-evolution of protein complex subunits. More recently, the Pal lab explored the consequences of compensatory adaptation on gene content evolution. It is well known that while core cellular processes are generally conserved during evolution, the underlying genes differ somewhat between related species. They demonstrated that gene loss initiates adaptive genomic changes that rapidly restores fitness, but this process has substantial pleiotropic effects on cellular physiology and evolvability upon environmental change.
 
==Network evolution==
The Pal lab has also contributed to the nascent field of evolutionary systems biology. Their research focused on understanding the extent to which evolution is predictable at the molecular level. Using genome-scale metabolic network modeling combined with experimental tools they studied key issues in evolution, such as mutational robustness, horizontal gene transfer, genome reduction, epistasis, promiscuous enzyme reactions, and complex adaptations.
==Awards and honours==
Csaba Pal received several domestic and international awards, including the Ignaz Lieben Award (2009), Szent-György Talentum Prize (2014), and the Bolyai Prize (2015). 
In 2016, Csaba Pal became member of Academiae Europae. In 2017 he was selected as EMBO (European Molecular Biology Organization) member. and in 2018, became a member of the FEMS. (Federation of European Microbiological Society)
== External Links ==
* Csaba Pal on Google Scholar
* Csaba Pal on Linkedin
* Csaba Pal Laboratory's Twitter handle
== References ==
Category:Biologists
Category:Hungarian biologists
Category:1975 births
Category:Synthetic biology
Category:Systems biology