Michael Schroeder - Bioinformatics

Previous and current research

Protein interactions are fundamental to all process in the cell. We are interested in networks of protein interactions derived from protein structures in the Protein Databank PDB and extracted by textmining from literature. We have developed two databases for protein interactions, www.scoppi.org, and for textmining, www.gopubmed.org.

Recently, we systematically characterized protein binding sites and established that 40% of domain families bind in multiple orientations, that binding orientation is not conserved in one third of gene fusions, that ancient interfaces are enriched by symmetric homodimers. We also developed an algorithm to identify convergently evolved interfaces, which allows us to identify many examples of viruses mimicking native interfaces.

Future prospects and goals

Prediction of binding partners
Extracting protein interactions from literature
Analysing and understanding atomic force microscopy data (collaboration with Mueller group)
Interpretation of high-throughput data (cooperation with groups at the medical faculty and Biotec)

Selected publications