Lecture Series

Introducing the research and people of my lab: focus on systems biology

Madhavi Ganapathiraju, PhD
Assistant Professor

Friday, September 11, 2009
11:00 AM to 12:00 PM
Parkvale Building (200 Meyran Avenue)
Classroom M-184 (on the mezzanine level), or via video conference at the UPMC Cancer Pavilion, Room 341

Abstract: In this presentation, I will talk about my research activities over the last year. Our work on sequence biology has been introduced to the department previously through one of my students’ talks. Here, I present the systems biology work.

Determining Protein-Protein Interactions (PPI) by high resolution experimental methods is resource intensive. High-throughput methods on the other hand have high false positive rates. In recent years with increasingly available annotations of individual proteins, it has become feasible to “attempt prediction” of protein-protein interactions. However, the state-of-the-art is far from having the ability to build a complete and accurate interactome.

Prediction of system level protein-protein interactions is not carried out from first principles. Instead, it is derived from a large amount of diverse indirect information about protein sequence, structure and function. A primary impediment to building an accurate and complete interactome is the lack of annotations of individual proteins.

The research work in my lab pertaining to this domain is on the following aspects: identifying, and analyzing different types of features that are useful in inferring PPIs, inferring protein annotations and employing active learning for prediction of protein-protein interactions.

For more information: www.dbmi.pitt.edu or 412.647.7113