Jake looking at a pair of protein structure on his computer

Jake Sumner ‘27 

(he/him)

Home Department: Computational Biology and Bioinformatics (O’Hern Lab)

Research Project: Assessing the quality of computational models of protein-protein interactions

Proteins play a crucial biological role by facilitating various reactions in the cell, often by interacting with other proteins. Understanding how proteins bind together can help predict new interactions, which is a major focus in science today. Despite efforts to create programs that evaluate these protein connections, they often fall short, even in relatively “simple” cases. Thus, we are studying where these programs do well and poorly by comparing them against a dataset we’ve carefully curated. Additionally, we’ve developed a basic scoring function based on just three features, which performs as well as more complex ones currently used.

Relevant Publications

Sumner et al. (2024) “Assessment of scoring functions for computational models of protein-protein interfaces.”

Diagram of two protein structures interacting with each other in different potential conformations