Biological Networks Protein

The National Breast Cancer Foundation (NBCF) has funded Associate Professor Christine Clark from the University of Sydney, to lead the development of Australia’s first National Breast Cancer Tissue Bank and she is the recipient of one of NBCF’s two inaugural collaborative research grants. As Chief Investigator of the $5 million grant, Christine is exploring new treatments in difficult to manage breast cancer patients. This multidisciplinary collaborative project includes significant collaboration between the key researchers including Professors Mark Ragan and Kevin Burrage at the Institute for Molecular Bioscience (IMB).  Mark and Kevin have been working on Biological Networks Protein interactions, a fundamental component of biological processes. See the project website.

Many proteins are functional only in multimeric complexes, or require interaction partners to achieve their correct localisation or function. For this reason, the study of protein-protein interaction (PPI) networks has become an area of growing interest in computational biology. The use of QCIF High Performance Computing has enabled the study of bio-chemical interaction networks in yeast data.  The inference of these networks provides a way to understand biological pathways and to identify drug targets. Such protein interaction networks are used to visualise gene expression data and facilitate decision support in the research project funded by the NBCF which aims to identify breast cancer treatments for underserved patient groups.

Figure (below): An example of a protein-protein interaction network built around the pregnane X receptor (PXR). Visualisation of the network is performed using the Cytoscape software [18]. The shapes represent different classes of proteins, the colour relates to the differential gene expression between two clinical cohorts.

Participants