Becat Seminar Series

BECAT SEMINAR SERIES

Decoding and defining the “words” of biology

Daniel Schwartz

Physiology and Neurobiology Department, UConn

Date: Thursday, October 14, 2010

Time: 2:00 PM

Refreshments: 1:45 PM

Location: ITE – Room 336

Abstract

As the “words” of the proteome, short linear protein motifs have the potential to vastly improve our basic understanding of protein function, and perhaps more importantly, the etiology of human disease. Although hundreds of such motifs have been discovered to date, given the enormous biological sequence space it remains likely that we have only deciphered a small portion of the biological dictionary. Here I will summarize work performed to build novel computational tools aimed at the discovery and prediction of protein motifs especially in the context of protein post-translational modifications. Additionally, how these tools can be applied to elucidate a variety of biological questions, with particular emphasis on viral-host protein interactions and potential therapeutic strategies, will be discussed.

Bio

Daniel Schwartz received his bachelor’s degree from Cornell University in Agricultural and Biological Engineering. As an undergraduate he performed research in the laboratory of Dr. Colin Parrish where he sequenced and characterized the Canine Minute Virus (CnMV), which subsequently led to the naming of the bocavirus genus (short for bovine canine virus). While a graduate student in the laboratory of Dr. Steven Gygi in the Department of Cell Biology at Harvard Medical School, Dr. Schwartz developed the motif-x algorithm (http://motif-x.med.harvard.edu), a widely used web tool for the discovery of over-represented sequence patterns in biological data sets. The motif-x web site has received over 15,000 hits from users in 81 countries. He did his post-doctoral training in the laboratory of Dr. George Church in the Department of Genetics at Harvard Medical School where he co-developed the scan-x tool to predict protein post-translational modifications in four model organisms (http://scan-x.med.harvard.edu). Dr. Schwartz recently created the first database of literature-based and predicted post-translational modification sites on viruses known to infect humans (http://virptm.hms.harvard.edu) with the ultimate goal of discovering therapeutic targets. He is currently an Assistant Professor in the Physiology and Neurobiology Department at the University of Connecticut.

Sanguthevar Rajasekaran

UTC Chair Professor of CSE and

Director of Booth Engineering Center for Advanced Technology

University of Connecticut

Storrs, CT 06269-2155