SSP Group Meeting
Wednesday, July 5th, 11am-12pm
Division of Informatics, 80 South Bridge, Room E17a


 

Predicting Protein Structure and Function from Sequences: Biomedical Significance and Computational Approaches

Siu-Wai Leung

It was officially announced in last week that Human Genome Project has achieved its goals. Now we are in the post-genomic era and we have a huge library of DNA sequences to study. As ``DNA makes RNA makes proteins", it would be useful to understand/predict something about proteins by computational approaches without/before doing the time-consuming and labour-intensive laboratory work. Although the prediction of protein structure and function from sequences was an extremely difficult (a kind of Nobel Prize winning) puzzle to solve, recent bioinformatics research have made some progress. In this talk, I shall briefly describe the structure-function relationship of proteins and the general approaches in bioinformatics to protein structure/function prediction, including ab initio prediction, comparative modelling, and protein fold recognition.