A Bioinformatic Approach to Infer Functional Interactions Within Protein Sequences

Prof. Geoff Webb, Faculty of Information Technology.

This project will develop and evaluate novel computational techniques to infer functional interactions between amino acids within proteins. These techniques use advanced data mining of standard protein databases to detect patterns in how the amino acids at groups of sites vary between proteins. The capacity to identify likely functional interactions in this manner will enable biologists and medical scientists to quickly generate strong testable hypotheses relevant to many areas of biological and medical research, opening up new lines of enquiry, greatly speeding the experimental process and with the potential to lead to significant biological and medical breakthroughs. The Monash e-Research Centre will be assisting by helping researchers to develop efficient computational techniques for identifying the appropriate subtle patterns in large datasets.