Prof . Shoba Ranganthan will be lecturing on Bioinformatics at this years BioInfoSummer, she gave us five minutes of her time to explain why she specialised in this area.
What do you think are the most interesting “big questions” in your field?
Using -omics data to actually provide personalized health care.
Please tell us about your research interests and what you are currently working on.
We are currently working on understanding the driving forces behind protein-protein interactions, finding the “missing” proteins in the human proteome and in designing candidate peptide vaccines and small molecule inhibitors.
Do you have favourite applications of your work and what is the impact of these applications?
Yes: we identified a specific protein-protein interface by structural modelling and docking implicated in metastasis, which is abrogated by the interface peptide from one of the proteins. This is a possible therapeutic strategy and we are very excited about this. Also, GWAS studies implicated a rare MHC Class II allele and we were contacted by the authors of this study to suggest candidate T cell epitope peptides which will suppress T cell activation. This is a difficult task and we are working on it.
Why did you chose this career?
I trained as a quantum chemist way back in 1983. In order to find practical applications of this training, I embarked on a post-doc in theoretical biochemistry in France and have been working in thie area since then – it now has a new name: bioinformatics.
Can you tell us about the highlight of your career so far?
The single most rewarding study has been predicting biomarkers for ovarian cancer – one of the candidate genes has been independently confirmed and we are waiting on results for the other predicted candidate genes.