“Bioinformatic mining of class-specific motifs in protein sequence classification,” will be presented by Dr. Chittibabu Guda, University of Nebraska Medical Center. The 4 p.m. talk on Feb. 15 is part of the spring Biotechnology/Life Sciences Seminar series.
In protein sequence classification, identification of the short sequence elements or n-grams that can precisely discriminate between different classes is a more interesting scientific question. Discriminative n-grams are short peptide sequences that are highly frequent in one class but are either minimally present or absent in other classes.
"In this study, we present a substitution based scoring function for identifying discriminative n-grams that are highly specific to a class. By mapping these discriminative n-grams back to the protein sequences we obtained contiguous n-grams that represent short class-specific motifs in protein sequences. We have validated our enriched set of short peptide sequences against the functionally important motifs obtained from the NLSdb and Prosite. We believe that this method can be successfully applied to many protein sequence classification problems that include identifying family-specific motifs in enzyme families," Guda said.
The seminar begins at 4 p.m., preceded by a reception at 3:30 p.m. in E103 Beadle Center. The seminar is free and open to the public. The complete schedule of seminars can be found at http://biotech.unl.edu/