Research Highlights

What cellular mechanisms underlie the organismal tolerance to a variety of stresses that yeast is exposed to during its bioethanol production of thermochemically pretreated plant material in industrial production? How can this tolerance be enhanced? Answers to these questions bear groundbreaking significances but are hard to obtain. Although the starting point of such research are experiemental data, it is imperative to combine expertise from large scale computing, statistics and visualization to study this subject effectively and comprehensively.

The specific research problem we address here focuses on pull-down technology for mapping protein-protein interactions, a key step for revealing a complex network of biological processes in the cell. While this technology can identify protein complexes, it is vulnerable to generating false positive interactions, and the pressing need to address such false positives presents a great challenge to the entire community.

ORNL researchers, led by Dr. Nagiza Samatova, have discovered that experimental data obtained by large-scale pull-down studies can produce more comprehensive biological information and fewer false positive interactions if they are interpreted in terms of a more general common-target model... Read more

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