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SUMMARY:Using Ontology to Classify Members of a Protein Family - Dr. Rober
 t Stevens\, School of Computer Science\, University of Manchester
DTSTART:20080414T131500Z
DTEND:20080414T141500Z
UID:TALK11487@talks.cam.ac.uk
CONTACT:8035
DESCRIPTION:In this talk\, I will describe work on using ontologies to hel
 p classify members  of the protein phosphatases in  a genome. Classificati
 on of proteins expressed by an organism is an important step in understand
 ing the molecular biology of that organism. Traditionally\, this classific
 ation has been done by human experts and it is regarded as the gold standa
 rd method. Human knowledge can recognise the properties that are sufficien
 t to place an individual gene product into a particular protein family gro
 up. Automation of this task usually fails to meet this gold standard becau
 se of the difficult recognition stage. The need to automate the classifica
 tion process by making human knowledge accessible in computational form is
  motivated by the growing number of genomes\, the rapid changes in knowled
 ge and the central role of classification in the annotation process. We ca
 pture human understanding of how to recognise members of the protein phosp
 hatase family by domain architecture as an ontology. By describing protein
  instances in terms of the domains they contain\, it is possible to use de
 scription logic reasoners and our ontology to assign those proteins to a p
 rotein family class.\n\nWe have tested our system on classifying the prote
 in phosphatases of the human and Aspergillus fumigatus genomes and found t
 hat our knowledge-based\, automatic classification matches that of the hum
 an curators and for these two species we have also found putative new phos
 phatase proteins. We have extended this method to survey three parasite ge
 nomes. We have made the classification process fast and reproducible and\,
  where appropriate knowledge is available\, the method can potentially be 
 generalised for use with any protein family.
LOCATION:Todd-Hamied Room\, Department of Chemistry
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