Proteins are often called the working molecules of the human body. A typical body has more than 20,000 different types of proteins, each of which is involved in many functions essential to human life.
Now, Purdue University researchers have designed a novel approach to use deep learning to better understand how proteins interact in the body – paving the way to producing accurate structure models of protein interactions involved in various diseases and to design better drugs that specifically target protein interactions. The work is released online in Bioinformatics.
“To understand molecular mechanisms of functions of protein complexes, biologists have been using experimental methods such as X-rays and microscopes, but they are time- and resource-intensive efforts,” said Daisuke Kihara, a professor of biological sciences and computer science in Purdue’s College of Science, who leads the research team. “Bioinformatics researchers in our lab and other institutions have been developing computational methods for modeling protein complexes. One big challenge is that a computational method usually generates thousands of models, and choosing the correct one or ranking the models can be difficult.”
