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Invited talk (2): 11:55 a.m. - 12:30 p.m.

Mitochondria

Speaker

Paul Horton, Team Leader, Computational Biology Research Center, Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST), Japan

Abstract

More by accident than by design, mitochondria have become a common thread joining a fair portion of our group's research. Fortunately, mitochondria are a fascinating subject with practical applications in medicine and energy.

I will introduce our ongoing research into the mitochondrial proteome, its sorting signals, the potential role of mRNA localization of mitochondrial proteins, and an analysis of nuclear copies of the mitochondrial genome (NUMTs). In particular, I will describe:

  1. Our redoubled efforts to characterize the outer membrane proteome of mitochondria, a new classifier for mitochondrial targeting signals based on recent proteomic scale data, mRNA characteristics of mitochondrial proteins.
  2. Our development of a novel mitochondrial protein cleavage site predictor.
  3. New results regarding which regions of the mitochondrial genome do not transfer easily to the nucleus and to what sort of nuclear genome sites NUMTs tend to be inserted into.

REFERENCES

Imai et al., BMC Genomics, 12:79, 2011.
Imai et al., Cell 135(7):1158-9, 2008.