Department of Biochemistry Douglas L. Brutlag Ph.D., Stanford, 1972.
Functional genomics leads to novel diagnostic methods for both inherited and infectious disease.
Analyses of protein structure and interactions results in discovery of new drug targets and rational drug design. We attack these critical problems using a variety of different representations of sequences and structures. Multiple representations of sequences include simple motif consensus sequence patterns, parametric representations, probabilistic techniques, graph theoretic approaches as well as computer simulations. Much of our work consists of developing a new representation of a structure or a function of a macromolecule, applying the methods of machine learning to this representation, and then evaluating the accuracy of the method. We have developed novel representations of sequence correlations that have predicted amino acid side chain interactions that stabilize protein strands and helices.