New Tool for Automatic Discovery of Protein Functional Sites

NSF funded researchers at the Database Lab of The Ohio State University have developed a new tool that can automatically discover functional regions from the three dimensional (3D) structure of a protein. Classical approaches to identification of these regions involved years of intensive genetic and molecular biology experiments. Whereas, the new computational tool has made it possible to find these functional sites in a matter of a few minutes. The method is based on automated analysis of a database which contains tens of thousands of experimentally determined protein 3D structures. Effective discovery of protein functional sites achieved by this project has tremendous impact in bioscience research. Applications include helping focus molecular biology experiments, classifying yet uncharacterized proteins, and drug design and targeting.

The significant sites of the protein are discovered (left) and the amino acids responsible for the protein's functionality (right, a closer look into site 1) are identified by the new tool.

(see Recent Research Highlights, pages CISE 8 – 11, http://www.nsf.gov/about/budget/fy2008/pdf/19_fy2008.pdf).

Your brief highlight should be about one page in length, and be understandable by a generally literate, but not necessarily technically specialized audience. It should say, in a nutshell, what your result/discovery/new cool thing is, and why it is important. Please highlight what is new and the broad impacts.

emphasize the challenge(s) in developing the tool for detecting significant local structural sites in proteins and how your research provided “transformative” or surprising or elegant or practical or …. results. Describe the problem, approach and results briefly. Provide more accolades on impact (knowledge dissemination, education, infrastructure, applications, service to society, …). Alos, please emphasize the interdisciplinary nature of your work.

Your image needs to link to/support/enhance the text. It is very important that the image is more-or-less self-explanatory, but the Caption needs to be also well written, so that just the image with the caption can tell a story. The image was not all that clear to me.