AI Seminar
January 27, 2003

Speaker: Jing He
Title:  3-dimensional protein structure determination and prediction

Abstract:
Human genome project is getting finished, the next major challenge is to
understand the shapes or 3-dimensional structures of all the proteins
encoded. Knowing protein sequence is not enough to understand the
mechanisms for biological functions and diseases because it is the
3-dimensional structure that determines the functions of a protein. In
this talk, I will start with an overview of the currently available
techniques for protein structure determination and methods for structure
prediction. The challenges facing these techniques and methods will be
addressed. I would like to discuss the aspects on structure prediction
using combined information from electron density of a protein at
intermediate resolution and secondary structure prediction techniques.
Some of the questions discussed could be potential projects for both
graduate and undergraduate students who are interested in bioinformatics.