In this talk I will be reviewing some of the structural bioinformatics research going on in the UCL Bioinformatics Unit and briefly introducing the recently formed Bloomsbury Centre for Bioinformatics. The BCB encompasses both bioinformatics biomedical research at UCL.

  In terms of research, I will concentrate on the wide array of tools and resources that have been developed for predicting protein structure for both globular and transmembrane proteins, predicting protein-protein interactions, predicting natively disordered regions in proteins and identifying domain boundaries in proteins. Recent work on developing methods for text mining and protein function prediction will also be briefly discussed. Our ultimate goal is to combine all of these tools to produce a comprehensive structural annotation of genome sequences, and I will outline our progress towards this goal.

Useful Web addresses: http://bioinf.cs.ucl.ac.uk , http://www.bcb.lon.ac.uk

References;

Jones D.T., Bryson K., Coleman A., McGuffin L.J., Sadowski M.I., Sodhi J.S., Ward J.J. (2005) Prediction of novel and analogous folds using fragment assembly and fold recognition. Proteins. 61 Suppl 7:143-51. PubMed

Pettitt, C.S., McGuffin, L.J. & Jones, D.T. (2005) Improving sequence-based fold recognition by using 3D model quality assessment. Bioinformatics 21(17):3509-3515. PubMed

Bryson, K., McGuffin, L. J., Marsden, R. L., Ward, J. J., Sodhi, J. S. & Jones, D. T. (2005) Protein structure prediction servers at University College London. Nucl. Acids Res. 33(Web Server issue):W36-38. PubMed