Publications by authors named "Sabrina Silveira"

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Proteins play a crucial role in organisms in nature. They are able to perform structural, catalytic, transport and defense functions in cells, among others. We understand that a variety of resources do exist to work with protein structural bioinformatics, which perform tasks such as protein modeling, protein docking, protein molecular dynamics, protein interaction, active and binding site prediction and mutation analysis.

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Metals are present in >30% of proteins found in nature and assist them to perform important biological functions, including storage, transport, signal transduction and enzymatic activity. Traditional and experimental techniques for metal-binding site prediction are usually costly and time-consuming, making computational tools that can assist in these predictions of significant importance. Here we present Genetic Active Site Search (GASS)-Metal, a new method for protein metal-binding site prediction.

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The development of new drugs is a very complex and time-consuming process, and for this reason, researchers have been resorting heavily to drug repurposing techniques as an alternative for the treatment of various diseases. This approach is especially interesting when it comes to emerging diseases with high rates of infection, because the lack of a quickly cure brings many human losses until the mitigation of the epidemic, as is the case of COVID-19. In this work, we combine an in-house developed machine learning strategy with docking, MM-PBSA calculations, and metadynamics to detect potential inhibitors for SARS-COV-2 main protease among FDA approved compounds.

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Proteins are responsible for most physiological processes, and their abundance provides crucial information for systems biology research. However, absolute protein quantification, as determined by mass spectrometry, still has limitations in capturing the protein pool. Protein abundance is impacted by translation kinetics, which rely on features of codons.

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Article Synopsis
  • Protein-peptide interactions are crucial for many biological functions and are increasingly important in drug development due to their low toxicity and small interaction areas.
  • A new database called Propedia has been launched, which contains over 19,000 high-resolution structures of protein-peptide complexes and allows users to analyze these interactions in detail.
  • Propedia uses advanced clustering algorithms for better analysis of peptide similarities and has been shown to effectively predict peptides that can inhibit the SARS-CoV-2 main protease, demonstrating its practical utility in therapeutic research.
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Motivation: The discovery of protein-ligand-binding sites is a major step for elucidating protein function and for investigating new functional roles. Detecting protein-ligand-binding sites experimentally is time-consuming and expensive. Thus, a variety of in silico methods to detect and predict binding sites was proposed as they can be scalable, fast and present low cost.

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Background: Protein-protein interactions (PPIs) are fundamental in many biological processes and understanding these interactions is key for a myriad of applications including drug development, peptide design and identification of drug targets. The biological data deluge demands efficient and scalable methods to characterize and understand protein-protein interfaces. In this paper, we present ppiGReMLIN, a graph based strategy to infer interaction patterns in a set of protein-protein complexes.

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Background: Interactions between proteins and non-proteic small molecule ligands play important roles in the biological processes of living systems. Thus, the development of computational methods to support our understanding of the ligand-receptor recognition process is of fundamental importance since these methods are a major step towards ligand prediction, target identification, lead discovery, and more. This article presents visGReMLIN, a web server that couples a graph mining-based strategy to detect motifs at the protein-ligand interface with an interactive platform to visually explore and interpret these motifs in the context of protein-ligand interfaces.

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Essential roles in biological systems depend on protein-ligand recognition, which is mostly driven by specific non-covalent interactions. Consequently, investigating these interactions contributes to understanding how molecular recognition occurs. Nowadays, a large-scale data set of protein-ligand complexes is available in the Protein Data Bank, what led several tools to be proposed as an effort to elucidate protein-ligand interactions.

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Background: A huge amount of data about genomes and sequence variation is available and continues to grow on a large scale, which makes experimentally characterizing these mutations infeasible regarding disease association and effects on protein structure and function. Therefore, reliable computational approaches are needed to support the understanding of mutations and their impacts. Here, we present VERMONT 2.

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In this paper, we propose an interactive visualization called VERMONT which tackles the problem of visualizing mutations and infers their possible effects on the conservation of physicochemical and topological properties in protein families. More specifically, we visualize a set of structure-based sequence alignments and integrate several structural parameters that should aid biologists in gaining insight into possible consequences of mutations. VERMONT allowed us to identify patterns of position-specific properties as well as exceptions that may help predict whether specific mutations could damage protein function.

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The volume and diversity of biological data are increasing at very high rates. Vast amounts of protein sequences and structures, protein and genetic interactions and phenotype studies have been produced. The majority of data generated by high-throughput devices is automatically annotated because manually annotating them is not possible.

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