Biomedical subjects
Publications and source records attributed to M Swindells.
Functional genomic and proteomic technologies are producing biological data relating to hundreds, or even thousands of proteins per experiment. Rapid and accurate computational analysis of the molecular function of these proteins is therefore crucial in order to interpret these data and prioritize further experiments.
Nicastrin, a protein implicated in Alzheimer's disease, has a domain that is found in the aminopeptidase/transferrin receptor superfamily. In nicastrin, this domain might possess catalytic activity (as observed with aminopeptidases) or it could serve merely as a binding domain (with analogy to the transferrin receptors) for the beta-amyloid precursor protein.
With the first draft of the human genome now available a directed genome-wide mining strategy is being implemented by many pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies in order to identify novel members of the most therapeutically relevant target families. At the same time there is an increasing amount of annotation relevant to the human genome sequence entering into the public domain. The ability to identify protein families on a genome-wide scale can only be done at speed by using high-throughput computational approaches. This review describes many of the latest algorithmic developments in this field and shows how they can be best put to use for target identification and prioritization.
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