Moleküler Biyoloji ve Genetik Seminerleri: Prof. Dr. Özlem Tastan Bishop
Moleküler Biyoloji ve Genetik Bölümümüzün organize ettiği seminer serisinin bu akademik yıldaki ilk konuğu, Prof. Dr. Özlem Tastan Bishop (Research Unit in Bioinformatics, Department of Biochemistry and Microbiology, Rhodes University) olacak.
Prof. Tastan-Bishop’ın “Proteins and missense mutations in health and disease” başlıklı konuşmasını 23 Ekim Pazartesi saat 16.30-17.30 arasında Galata Salonu’nda takip edebilirsiniz.
Özet: The genome sequences of humans and pathogens, and the variations (mutations) attached to these data, can offer fundamental insights into disease prevention and treatment. Decoding the effects of missense mutations on protein structure and function is crucial to the understanding of the underlying causes of inherited diseases; drug toxicity in particular populations; and mechanisms of drug resistance, among others. While an enormous amount of genome data has been generated, the transition to post genomic analysis has been slow, thus widening the gap between data generation and translational utilization. For example, the human genome consists of about 20,000 protein coding genes and over 900 million variants. Systematic knowledge of the impact of genomic alterations in human is critical for the development of effective medicines. However, it is simply not feasible to study each and every one of these variants in detail. To date the effect of variations at the protein level is poorly studied in computational drug discovery research. This is mainly due to experimental difficulties in analyzing data at the protein structural level. We previously proposed a post-hoc analysis approach of molecular dynamics simulations using dynamic residue network analysis to consider the dynamic nature of functional proteins and protein-drug complexes and to probe the impact of mutations and their allosteric effects. This talk focuses on examples including understanding the effects of missense mutations linked to drug metabolizing enzymes in humans and to drug resistance in infectious diseases; proposing computational approaches for common ways of dealing with different health problems.
Konuşmacı Hakkında: Özlem is full Professor in structural bioinformatics at Rhodes University, South Africa and distinguished adjunct Professor at Saveetha University, Chennai, India.
She received her BSc degree in Physics from Boğaziçi University, Istanbul, Turkey. Then she moved to the Department of Molecular Biology and Genetics at the same University for her MSc degree. She obtained her PhD from Max-Planck Institute for Molecular Genetics and Free University, Berlin, Germany in 2003. While doing her PhD, Özlem became interested in structural biology, and during her postdoctoral positions (Texas University, USA; University of Western Cape and University of Pretoria, South Africa) she gained experience in structural bioinformatics as well as structural biology.
In 2009, Özlem took up an academic position at Rhodes University, South Africa. She established the Research Unit in Bioinformatics (RUBi) in 2013. She has graduated 25 PhD and over 35 MSc students since she joined Rhodes University. She received the Vice Chancellor’s Distinguished Senior Research award for 2020 and South African Society for Bioinformatics (SASBi) Silver Award, 2022.
She serves on the Editorial Board for PLOS One and Frontiers in Molecular Biosciences and Frontiers in Applied Mathematics and Statistics, Biological Modeling and Simulation Section, and she is an Advisory Board member of F1000Research Bioinformatics Gateway.
Özlem’s broad research interest is structural bioinformatics and its applications to drug design and development. Her recent interest is in the allosteric mechanisms of proteins and understanding the effects of nonsynonymous single nucleotide variations on protein structure and function. She has published over 90 research articles.