by Colleen Carey (Sept. 2004)

Christopher Bystroff, assistant professor of biology at Rensselaer, presented a paper at the largest computational biology conference in the world this past August.

The conference, which combined the 12th International conference on intelligent systems for molecular biology (ISMB) and the 3rd European conference on computational biology (ECCB), was held in Glasgow, Scotland.

The paper, written by Mohammed J. Zaki (associate professor, computer science), Vinay Nadimpally (graduate student, computer science), Deb Bardhan (graduate student, computer science), and Bystroff was one of 67 chosen from over 500 entries.

The paper discusses structured folding pathways, which are time ordered sequences of folding events. They play an important role in the protein folding process and in the conformational search. So, pathway prediction gives more insight into the folding process and is a valuable guiding tool to search the conformation space.

The authors propose a novel ‘unfolding’ approach to predict the folding pathway. They apply graph-based methods on a weighted secondary structure graph of a protein to predict the sequence of unfolding events. When viewed in reverse this yields the folding pathway. They demonstrate the success of their approach on several proteins whose pathway is partially known.

ISMB (Intelligent Systems for Molecular Biology) is an international conference sponsored by the International Society for Computational Biology. The ISMB conferences provide a multidisciplinary forum for disseminating the latest developments in bioinformatics. ISMB brings together scientists from computer science, molecular biology, mathematics, and statistics. Its principal focus is on the development and application of advanced computational methods for biological problems.

The European Conference on Computational Biology (ECCB) is a multi-disciplinary conference that bridges the fields of computer science, mathematics, physics, chemistry, and biology by bringing together involved scientists from all over the world.

Published September 1, 2004