Jun Huan
UNC Chapel Hill
Date:
Thursday March 9, 2006
Time:
Location: 101 Perkins
Abstract
The rapidly growing body of 3D protein structures provides new opportunities to study the link between protein structure and protein function. Local structural comparison of proteins, which identifies arrangements of amino acids common to a family of proteins, is a way to discover structural features that link protein structure to protein function. Traditional approaches to local structural comparison of proteins operate in a pair-wise fashion and have prohibitive computational cost when scaled to families of proteins. This talk describes my research on graph-based representations of protein structure and new subgraph mining algorithms to identify recurring structural patterns shared by many members of a family of proteins. A statistical measure is defined to evaluate the significance of each pattern's association with a family of proteins compared to all known protein structures.
Two collaborations with domain experts at the UNC School of Pharmacy and the UNC Medical School illustrate the use of these techniques. The first is to predict the function of several newly characterized protein structures. The second is to identify conserved structural features in evolutionarily related proteins. This talk presents results from both applications and concludes with my future research plans in the areas of data mining, proteomics, and systems biology.
Short Bio:
Mr. Huan is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Computer Science and a member of the Bioinformatics and Computational Biology Training Program at the University of North Carolina. He received his B.S. in Biochemistry from the Peking University, China in 1997 and an M.S. in Computer Science from the Oklahoma State University in 2000. He worked at Argonne National Laboratory and Nortel before he joined UNC and has current collaborations with GlaxoSmithKline. His research interests include data mining, proteomics, systems biology, and high performance computing. He was a recipient of the UNC Scholar of Tomorrow Fellowship in 2001 and the Alumni Fellowship in 2005.