Sobia will be presenting the initial work from her PhD project today at the EMBO Workshop, The modularity of signalling proteins and networks at Seefeld in Tirol, Austria. Her talk is on:
Predicting Motif Mimicry in Viruses
Viruses mimic host motifs to hijack the host cellular machinery. Their interaction with host protein domains is through Short Linear Motifs (SLiMs). SLiMs are short stretches of amino acids (~3-10) which are involved in post translational modifications (PTMs), protein-protein Interactions (PPIs), cell regulation and cell compartment targeting. To date, several studies have been conducted to identify PPIs, but no specific study to see how well different PPI capturing methods capture SLiMs-mediated interactions. The main objectives of this study are 1) to predict Domain Motif Interactions (DMIs) among viral and host proteins 2) to find whether virhostome (virus-human interaction) data is enriched for DMIs and, 3) to see which PPI method is better for studying DMIs. Results have shown that virhostome data is enriched for DMIs and can be a good source to study motif mimicry in viruses. The permutation test showed more enrichment for TAP data as compared to the Y2H data. Moreover, novel candidate DMIs have been discovered which need further validations. The outcome of this study will be helpful in uncovering unique strategies of viruses to interact with human proteins which will eventually be significant for pathogen research.
Poster to follow.
