Sibo Tao

Comparing biochemical and structural properties in predicting pro-apoptotic peptide efficacy

Started Jan. 20, 2023

Abstract or project description

Pro-apoptotic peptides have been an area of anti-cancer therapeutics that holds much potential, but requires more exploration. The aim of this project is to determine whether biochemical/physical properties or structural information are more predictive of binding affinity. Previous similar research has been conducted on proteins and their functionality, but there may be a difference in results in this project due to the exact nature of the functionality (inducing apoptosis vis mitochondrial pathway) and potentially more importantly, the size of the proteins (these peptides are much smaller than other explored proteins). To do this, Gary will build models using different input features based on biochemical properties and/or structural properties to predict efficacy and determine which leads to the best performing model. Additional feature analysis will identify which specific property is most indicative of binding affinity. If time permitting, these models can be used on other anti-cancer peptide datasets.