Bioinformatics Seminar
Time: 11AM
Venue: Davis Auditorium and Online
9 July 2024
Profiling protein complexes and their functions: a computational perspective
Chen LiMonash University
Protein complexes, consisting of two or more interacting proteins, play a fundamental role in mediating and regulating numerous biological activities. Alterations of a protein complex, in terms of subunit composition or arrangement and complex abundance, often lead to functional changes that may result in pathogenic consequences. Therefore, protein complexes could be regarded as potential biomarkers in addition to the traditional biomarkers that are individual proteins. Accurately predicting novel protein complexes from proteomic data and characterizing their functions can add a vital layer to biomarker discovery in personalized disease diagnoses and treatment. In this talk, I will first introduce our recently developed software package, PCprophet, to predict novel protein complexes and identify statistically significant differences across conditions from co-fractionation proteomic data. Then I will introduce PCfun, a natural language processing and machine-learning framework trained on PubMed articles and protein complex databases to annotate the functions of novel protein complexes. It is anticipated that the two packages can assist in the discovery of biomarkers consisting of protein complexes for precision diagnosis and treatment of diseases.