STRUCTURAL AND FUNCTIONAL EVOLUTION OF PROTEINS
Dr Leighton Pritchard, Institute of Biological Sciences, University of Wales, Aberystwyth

Abstract: Aligned protein sequences often display the property of correlated evolution, which can be extrapolated to develop a model of protein evolution analogous to the process by which a Hopfield neural network `remembers' a trained state. The implication of this is that the evolved functional chemistry of a protein could be a biological example of emergent behaviour, strongly dependent on the protein's fold. In this seminar, I will discuss the development of this neural network-based model of protein evolution, and the use of sequence and structural analyses to investigate the corresponding protein structure-function relationships.

This seminar was held at the Department of Computer Science, Royal Holloway, University of London on 11 June 2001.

back