Publications by authors named "Benjamin A Lewis"

Efforts to predict interfacial residues in protein-RNA complexes have largely focused on predicting RNA-binding residues in proteins. Computational methods for predicting protein-binding residues in RNA sequences, however, are a problem that has received relatively little attention to date. Although the value of sequence motifs for classifying and annotating protein sequences is well established, sequence motifs have not been widely applied to predicting interfacial residues in macromolecular complexes.

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Article Synopsis
  • RNA molecules have various crucial roles in cells, including serving as messengers, catalysts, and regulators of gene expression, often interacting with specific proteins for these functions.
  • Understanding how proteins recognize and bind to RNA is vital for developing new therapies for diseases like AIDS and cancer, but the mechanisms behind these interactions remain largely unknown.
  • A review comparing different machine learning techniques (like Naïve Bayes and Support Vector Machine) for predicting RNA-binding residues in proteins reveals challenges due to inconsistencies in datasets and assessment methods.
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Telomerases constitute a group of specialized ribonucleoprotein enzymes that remediate chromosomal shrinkage resulting from the "end-replication" problem. Defects in telomere length regulation are associated with several diseases as well as with aging and cancer. Despite significant progress in understanding the roles of telomerase, the complete structure of the human telomerase enzyme bound to telomeric DNA remains elusive, with the detailed molecular mechanism of telomere elongation still unknown.

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The Protein-RNA Interface Database (PRIDB) is a comprehensive database of protein-RNA interfaces extracted from complexes in the Protein Data Bank (PDB). It is designed to facilitate detailed analyses of individual protein-RNA complexes and their interfaces, in addition to automated generation of user-defined data sets of protein-RNA interfaces for statistical analyses and machine learning applications. For any chosen PDB complex or list of complexes, PRIDB rapidly displays interfacial amino acids and ribonucleotides within the primary sequences of the interacting protein and RNA chains.

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