Thesis defence of Javier García: "Protein-protein interaction network: management of databases and its applications on the computational study of protein-protein interactions”

Today 23^rd of January, Javier García, member of the Structural Bioinformatics group of GRIB (IMIM-UPF) will defend his thesis at 11:00 at Sala Ramon y Cajal – Campus Mar (PRBB). You are all invited to this event.

ABSTRACT:

The use of protein-protein interaction networks has become crucial due to the emergence of systems biology. The completeness and quality of networks, crucial to understand the biochemical mechanisms underlying a system such as a cell, are still challenging the scientific community. This thesis focuses on the data completeness challenge by the development of flexible tools for biological data management. It presents a database framework, BIANA, in which the integrated access to several information sources tackles this problem by unraveling hidden biological associations. BIANA is used to develop protein-protein interaction inference tools based on sequence similarity and protein-protein interactions. I have applied the approach on Salmonella-host infection, a case study where experimental data is scarce. Finally, I have focused on the integration problem of protein sequence annotation, also addressing the prediction of protein-protein interaction interfaces. I have developed a new evaluation measure to compare the predictive power of interface inference approaches.