Research Interests
- Bioinformatics
- Protein structure prediction
- Protein-protein & protein-ligand docking
- New drug design
- Single molecule mechanics
One of the major projects in our laboratory is to develop novel
computational algorithms for the genome-scale and high-resolution
prediction of protein structures and protein-ligand interactions.
The goal is to annotate the function of proteins based on the
sequence-to-structure-to-function paradigm
and therefore enhance the impact of genome sequencing on biology and medicine.
Research Highlights - Performance in CASP7
Critical Assessment of Structure Prediction (CASP)
is a biennial worldwide competition in protein structure prediction,
which has also been called Olympic games of protein structure prediction.
The organizer releases a number of amino acid sequences whose
structure is unknown to the predictors.
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 table lists the accumulative 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]