About me
Hello! I am Gayatri Kumar, a computational biologist by training, who, on the road to PhD, has discovered a fondness for 'coding' puzzles among other interests.
As my initial training was in biotechnology, I can never cease to appreciate the limitless scope of learning that biological systems offer. As the building blocks of life, proteins are by far the most intriguing system and provide multiple different ways to address scientific questions. Biology is after all, applied science.
As an aside, a parallel interest in literature has offered many creative venues to keep my right brain up to speed.
PhD Thesis Overview
Title: Use of strategically designed protein-like sequences in structure and function recognition
In my doctoral studies strategically designed sequences were employed in the recognition of new structure and function based relationships between protein families. These sequences have been shown to improve homology detection between sequentially distant members of a structural fold by filling the void and sparse regions in protein sequence space. In this work, we have for the first time extended the use of these designed proteins in identifying evolutionary relationships.
PS: The graphic to the right top of this page was created using data from one of my thesis chapters.
Projects
Each of my thesis chapters is described in a nutshell in the following pages. Please click on an image here to see the chapter title and navigate to the chapter project page.
1. Foldability of designed sequences
2. Designed sequences in structure recognition
3. Faster homology detection using sequence profiles
4. Recognition of vicinal and distant functional relationships
5. Function annotation based on sequence homology
6. CombiND - sequence space expansion in improving homology detection