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Invited talk
in
Workshop: Generative AI and Biology (GenBio@NeurIPS2023)

Invited talk | Debora Marks

Debora Marks

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Sat 16 Dec 11:30 a.m. PST — 11:50 a.m. PST

Abstract:

The Marks lab is a new interdisciplinary lab dedicated to developing rigorous computational approaches to critical challenges in biomedical research, particularly on the interpretation of genetic variation and its impact on basic science and clinical medicine. To address this we develop algorithmic approaches to biological data aimed at teasing out causality from correlative observations, an approach that has been surprisingly successful to date on notoriously hard problems. In particular, we developed methods adapted from statistical physics and graphical modeling to disentangle true contacts from observed evolutionary correlations of residues in protein sequences. Remarkably, these evolutionary couplings, identified from sequence alone, supplied enough information to fold a protein sequence into 3D. The software and methods we developed is available to the biological community on a public server that is quick and easy for non-experts to use. In this evolutionary approach to accurately we have predicted the 3D structure of hundreds of proteins and large pharmaceutically relevant membrane proteins. Many of these were previously of unknown structure and had no homology to known sequences; two of the large membrane proteins have now been experimentally validated. We have now applied this approach genome wide to determine the 3D structure of all protein interactions that have sufficient sequences and can demonstrate the evolutionary signature of alternative conformations.

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