- Protein structure prediction
- Ligand-protein docking
- Protein-protein interactions
- Structure and function of G protein-coupled receptors
- New drug design
Determining structure and function of protein molecules is a cornerstone
of many aspects of modern biology and medicine. The main focus of our lab is
to develop bioinformatics algorithms to predict the 3-dimensional structures
of proteins from amino acid sequences
and then deduce the biological functions based on the
sequence-to-structure-to-function paradiam.
We are also working on the modeling
of ligand-protein and protein-protein interactions. We are especially
interested in the structures of G protein-coupled receptors
(GPCR) and the interactions with the associated ligands with the purpose of
developing new drugs to regulate these interactions.
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Research Highlights - Performance in CASP7
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Critical Assessment of Structure Prediction (CASP)
is a biennial worldwide experiment in protein structure prediction,
which has been frequently called Olympic Games of protein structure prediction.
The organizer releases a number of amino acid sequences whose
structure is unknown to the predictors and the structures predicted by the
participants have to be submitted before a deadline.
Finally, the predicted structures are
compared by an independent team with the structures solved
by X-ray or NMR experiments.
The 7th CASP competition was held in 2006,
which included Human and Server sections.
Depending on modeling difficulty, the targets were split into 3 categories: HA (easy),
TBM (medium), and FM (hard) targets. Our lab participated in the CASP7 experiment
as "Zhang" in the Human section and as "Zhang-Server" in the Server section; both
were ranked as the No 1 according to the accumulative GDT-TS score of all targets.
The results based on a variety of other ranking criterions can be found at
CASP7 websites.
The table lists the cumulative GDT_TS scores of the top-10 groups
ranked by the first model in each category.
A name with "*" indicates a server predictor.
The picture shows a histogram of Z-score of the GDT-TS score of all groups in the
CASP7 Server Section.
The following picture shows one of the successful examples from the target T0382 from Rhodopseudomonas Palustris CGA009
crystallized by the structure genomics project.
I-TASSER starts from the template structures which are more than 9 Angstroms away from the native
structure (left panel) and builds a model of 3.6 Angstroms (right panel).
More detailed data of the automated assessments of the CASP7 results can be seen at
here,
or at the webpages by other groups:
[BioInfoBank]
[CAFASP5]
[McGufin]
[Offman]
[Robetta]
[SBC]
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