September 19, 2007: Seminar: Teresa Przytycka: "Application of combinatorial optimization to prediction of domain-domain interactions"

Abstract:

Comprehending the cell functionality requires knowledge about the functionality of individual proteins as well as the interactions among them. Proteins typically contain two or more domains, and a protein interaction usually involves binding between specific pairs of domains. Identifying such interacting domain pairs is an important step towards determining the protein-protein interaction network. We demonstrate that evolutionary parsimony principle combined with combinatorial optimization techniques leads to an approach to detecting domain-domain interactions that outperforms other methods to attack the problems.

Brief Bio:

Teresa Przytycka obtained the MS from the Department of Mathematics, Mechanics and Computer Science University of Warsaw, Poland and Ph.D. in from the Department of Computer Sciences, University of British Columbia Canada. Subsequently, she perused a carrier Computer Science (theory of algorithms) and graph theory publishing numerous research papers in these areas. After wining the Sloan Postdoctoral Fellowship she moved to Johns Hopkins University where she started doing research in computational molecular biology and biophysics under mentorship of Prof. George Rose. While at JHU, she was also awarded Burroughs Welcome Fellowship. In 2003 she joined NCBI as a tenure track investigator where she continues her carrier in Computational Biology heading a research group "Algorithms and Graph Theory for Computational and Systems Biology". Dr. Przytycka's current research interest includes computational analysis of biological networks, predicting protein-protein and domain-domain interactions, evolutionary and comparative genomics and phylogeny analysis.