Bioinformatics of Aggregation-Prone Proteins

Friday April 7, Professor Michel Wise will address in his lecture bioinformatics aspects of protein-protein interactions. In his talk, he will focus on protein aggregation. Knowledge of protein aggregation is important from a pathological (e.g. Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s disease) and biotechnological (formation of inclusion bodies) viewpoint. Professor Wise acted as co-promotor of Yair Benita who will defend his thesis on April 6 at 10.15.

Lecture-abstract
All proteins will aggregate if pushed. However, aggregation-prone proteins (and protein domains) appear to do so quite readily, giving rise to pathological conditions, e.g.amyloidosis, or as part of their function, e.g. spider-web proteins. Many aggregation-prone proteins have low-complexity amino acid sequences, i.e. they are highly repetitive. Novel analyses are required for these proteins because most of the currently available bioinformatics tools have been developed for moderately-sized globular proteins and are often unable to deal with low complexity sequences, despite these proteins often being enormously significant biologically. To meet that need, a number of software applications have been created and are being distributed under license.

After a brief overview of projects being undertaken by the Wise Lab, Michael Wise shall focus on software tools, particularly 0j.py and The POPPs suite, that can deal with low complexity/non-globular proteins, many of which are natively unfolded, and look at a number of applications of the new software tools.

About Michael Wise
Michael Wise is a joint Associate Professor in the Schools of Biomedical & Chemical Sciences, Computer Science & Software Engineering and in the Faculty of Natural and Agricultural Sciences. Since the early 1990s Michael's research focus has been Bioinformatics, following many years in mainstream computer science research, particularly language primitives for parallel computation and automated plagiarism detection. He spent 11 years at the University of Sydney, and in 1998 he was responsible for the world's second undergraduate programme in Bioinformatics, a programme which continues to run successfully. From 1999-2004, he held the position of Bristol-Myers Squibb Senior Research Fellow at Pembroke College, Cambridge, where he also was the Director of Studies for Computer Science.

Information:
April 7: 10.00-11.00
UIPS Lecture: "Bioinformatics of aggregation-prone proteins"
By: Dr. Michael Wise, The University of Western Australia, Crawley, Australia
Location: Room N017, Wentgebouw, Sorbonnelaan 16, Utrecht