Automate NMR protein structure determination through computations

Speaker:	Dr. Xin GAO
		Carnegie Mellon University

Title:		"Automate NMR protein structure determination
		 through computations"

Date:		Monday, 26 April 2010

Time:		4:00pm - 5:00pm

Venue:		Lecture Theater F (near lifts 25/26) HKUST

Abstract:

Protein three-dimensional structure determination is the key towards the
understanding of the function of the human body. Nuclear Magnetic
Resonance (NMR) is one of the two main methods for protein structure
determination. Currently it takes weeks to months of human labor to
determine a protein structure after NMR experiments. If we could fully
automate this process, this would significantly speedup the structural
biology research. In this talk, we will identify the key obstacles in this
process and propose solutions by computational methods. We developed a
peak picking method based on signal processing techniques, a resonance
assignment method based on optimization techniques, and a structure
calculation method based on machine learning techniques. Each of these
methods subtly handles the noise and imperfection of the others and
significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art approaches. Our final
system AMR has succeeded in determining high resolution protein structures
from a small set of NMR spectra, in a day


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Biography:

Dr. Xin Gao is a Lane Fellow in Lane Center for Computational Biology in
School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University. Dr. Gao received
his B.Sc. degree in Computer Science from Tsinghua University, China in
2004, and his Ph.D. degree in Computer Science from the University of
Waterloo in 2009. Dr. Gao's research interests include bioinformatics,
computational biology, algorithms, and machine learning.