Prof.  Minghui  Li
School of Biology & Basic Medical Sciences, Soochow University,  China

Title: Identification of functionally important missense mutations in cancer genomes

Abstract:

There has been a rapid development of genome-wide techniques in the last decade along with significant lowering of the cost of gene sequencing, which generated widely available genomic data. However, the interpretation of genomic data and prediction of the association of genetic variations with diseases and phenotypes still require significant improvement. Missense mutations can render proteins nonfunctional and may be responsible for many diseases. The effects caused by missense mutations can be pinpointed by in silico modeling that makes it more feasible to find a treatment and reverse the effect. Specific human phenotype is largely determined by stability, activity, and interactions between proteins and with other biomolecules which work together to provide specific cellular functions. Therefore, the analysis of the effects of missense mutations on proteins and their complexes would give us important clues for identifying functionally important missense mutations, understanding the molecular mechanisms of diseases and facilitating their treatment and prevention.Herein,wedevelopedpowerfulcomputational methods and tools to estimate the effects of missense mutations on proteinstability, binding affinity and function, and provide a molecular understanding of the mutational impacts. By investigating all cancer-related missense mutations on Casitas B-lineage lymphoma gene that is found in manytumors, wefoundthatprotein stability changes and binding affinity changes are highly correlated with the function of mutant proteins and can successfully predict the functional consequences of cancer mutations on proteinactivity.

Biography:

Dr. Li is currently a professor in School of Biology & Basic Medical Sciences at Soochow University. Dr. Li received her Ph.D. in Computational Biophysics from the State Key Laboratory of Theoretcial and Computational Chemistry at Jilin University, China in 2010. Upon completion of her Ph.D., Dr. Li spent two years as a Postdoctoral Fellow in Computational Biophysics at The State University of New York at Buffalo in the USA. Then she moved to National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI), National Institutes of Health (NIH) and worked as a Postdoctoral Fellow and Research Fellow from 2012 to 2016.Dr. Li’s primary research interests are in understanding the mechanisms of molecular recognition in biological systems, identifying disease-causing/cancer driver nonsynonymous mutations and building the relationship between genotype and phenotype at the molecular and atomic level using computational biophysics-based and bioinformatics methods. She balances method development with the application of these powerful tools to relevant cancer related targets (Please visit Dr Li’s group websitehttps://lilab.jysw.suda.edu.cn for more information).