Membrane proteins account for 20-30% of the entire cellular proteome (Boyd et al., 1998, Wallin and von Heijne, 1998) and carry out crucial functions for cellular development and maintenance. However, the lipidic environment surrounding these proteins often hamper biophysical and functional assays to study them.
During my PhD, entitled “Profiling patterns of inter helical associations in membrane proteins“, I combined pattern recognition and machine learning algorithms and developed predictive algorithms to characterize polytopic membrane proteins by predicting: i) topological features in the transmembrane region; ii) cellular localization and; iii) molecular function.
Publications related to this project:
- Lasso G, Antoniw JF, Mullins JGL (2006). A combinatorial pattern discovery approach for the prediction of membrane dipping (re-entrant) loops. Bioinformatics 22 (14), e290-e297.