The long-term goal of the group is to investigate the basic principles of how 3D structures of biomolecules (e.g., protein 3D folds) regulate cellular functions in health and disease from a systems biology perspective.
To this end, the group aims to investigate protein folds focusing on, e.g., alternative splicing, misfolding, and fold switching.
Additionally, the group aims to investigate how changes in protein folds perturb the underlying biological networks, and how such perturbed networks can be used to unravel disease mechanisms and biomarkers.
Alternative splicing (or simply ‘splicing’) results in multiple protein isoforms from a single gene. Proteins function by physically interacting with each other to form protein-protein interactions (PPIs). Hence, the effects of splicing on individual proteins could also be reflected on PPIs. For example, two different protein isoforms of a gene could interact differently with the same protein partner. Large-scale investigations of such splicing-induced PPI changes could provide insights into splicing-driven disease mechanisms and help identify drug targets. We build computational approaches to capture such splicing-driven effects on disruptions of know protein complexes in diseases.