COMPUTATIONAL
BIOLOGY
Finding Genes, Predicting Protein Structure
ORNL's computational biology researchers played an important role in the Human Genome Project. In 2001, special issues of Science and Nature that included the draft of the human genome made reference to ORNL's bioinformatics research. ORNL's Frank Larimer, Jay Snoddy, and Ed Uberbacher are listed as co-authors on the lead paper of the Nature issue. The GRAIL gene-finding tool, developed by Uberbacher and Richard Mural, was used for the work, and it is mentioned on Science's human genome program timeline.
Ying Xu and Dong Xu developed the Protein Structure Prediction and Evaluation Computer Toolkit (PROSPECT), computational tools for predicting three-dimensional structures of proteins from their amino acid sequences. Knowledge of these specific three-dimensional structures is vital to disease research and drug discovery. PROSPECT can determine a protein's geometry in a few hours, rather than the months required by traditional experiments. PROSPECT has been ranked among the world's best protein-structure prediction tools.
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