Dr. Ana Rojas, Institute of Biomedicine in Seville, Campus University Hospital, Spain
Tuesday 23rd May, 1.00 p.m., Stacey Lecture Theatre 1
Distinct features of proteins can be explored at different levels of information. This orthogonal and complementary approach is extremely useful to address different aspects of function. In this context, evolutionary constraints and/or consequences are frequently neglected in current biomedical approaches, jeopardizing the interpretation of meaningful information.
To address the essential contribution of including evolutionary information and to demonstrate its benefits, I will focus on distinct problems: 1) First I will describe the “computational making-up” of the protein repertoire of the human DNA Damage Response, and how this work enabled to spot unexpected evolutionary events in bacteria5. Then, 2) I will describe the computational characterization of a novel MMR protein in prokaryotes pointing to the existence of an alternative MMR pathway. This latter finding could be of special relevance to fight multi-resistance in Bacteria.