On Nov. 04 Dr. Zoran Obradovic, Director of Center for Information Science and Technology, gave a keynote lecture at the IEEE International Conference on Bioinformatics and Biomedicine. This multidisciplinary conference brought together computational scientists from several disciplines and from several continents who exchanged research results in databases, algorithms, interfaces, visualization, modeling, simulation and ontology as applied to high throughput data-rich areas in biology and biomedical engineering.
In his keynote lecture “Functions of Intrinsically Disordered Proteins and Relationship with Human Disease Network,” Dr. Obradovic described their award winning predictor of protein disorder (CASP 7) and explained how they recently used it to provide a leap jump in understanding relationship between protein disorder and protein function. In particular, he discussed their characterization of 238 Swiss-Prot functional categories as strongly positively correlated with predicted long intrinsically disordered regions. He also presented the results of their most recent large scale analysis of intrinsic disorder in genes implicated in Human Disease Network. This new study found that intrinsic disorder in disease genes is mainly involved in protein-protein interactions. Genes related to several classes of diseases were found to have significantly higher occurrence of alternative splicing (AS), and strong evidence was provided that intrinsic disorder, together with AS, plays an important role in these classes of diseases.