Dr Dietlind L. Gerloff
Assistant Professor
Location: office PSB 320
Telephone:9x4833
Email:
gerloff@soe.ucsc.edu
Web-Site:
Research
Group
WWW-page
to
appear
shortly
C.V.
Dr
sc
nat,
Department
of
Chemistry,
ETH
Zurich
1994
Swiss
National
Science
Foundation
and
Leukemia
Society
of
America
Postdoctoral
Fellow,
Department
of
Cellular
&
Molecular
Pharmacology,
University
of
California
San
Francisco
1995-1998
Lecturer
in
Bioinformatics,
University
of
Edinburgh
1999-2006
Joined UC Santa Cruz in 2006.
Teaching
Spring 2007: BME220 (with Kevin Karplus); BME280B. More details soon.
Fall 2007: BME225 - Protein Function in Biology and Bioinformatics; BME281G - Seminar in Protein Function
Research interests
We
are
a
young
bioinformatics/biocomputing
group
with
primary
interests
in
the
structural/evolutionary
principles
of
interactions
between
proteins
–
but
also
in
how
an
appreciation
of
these
principles
combined
with
computer
science can
help
us
make
sense
of
the
vast
amounts
of
functional
genomics
data
that
are
being
produced
at
present.
We
are
developing
novel
approaches
to
facilitate
research
in
all
areas
of
modern
biology
by
working
at
the
interface
between
information
technology
and engineering,
structural
biochemistry,
evolutionary
biology,
and
experimental
molecular
biology.
(See
below
for
selected
publications.)
A
molecular
understanding
of
biomolecular
interactions,
and
our
ability
to
predict
them
from
sequence,
is
especially
important
for
informing
computational
efforts
in
systems
biology,
which
aim
to
understand
biology
through
modelling.
It
can
also
provide
helpful
clues
toward
resolving
other
fundamental
scientific
issues,
ranging
from
evolutionary
mechanisms
to
experimental
design
in
functional
genomics,
and
is
the
driving
force
behind
our
emphasis
on
multidisciplinary
research
strategies.
Often target proteins for individual analyses are suggested through collaborations with colleagues investigating them in the laboratory. Even more important than the actual biological insight gained is, to us, that we are working toward a better understanding of sequence-structure-function relationships in these cases – in protein families that may have special features, i.e. are “non-standard” by comparison to proteins for which structures have been solved experimentally. The awareness of, for example, repetitive structure and how it may affect the results of standard bioinformatics programs, is important if these programs are to be applied to a wider range of molecules than they were developed for, and tested upon
Representative publications
X. Quan, C. Walton, D. L. Gerloff, J. L. Sharman and D. Robertson (2006). Peer-to-peer experimentation in protein structure prediction: an architecture, experiment and initial results. International Workshop on Distributed, High-Performance and Grid Computing in Computational Biology (GCCB 2006), pp. 75-98.
D. L. Gerloff, A. Creasey, S. Maslau and R. Carter (2005). Structural models for the protein family characterised by the Pfs230 gamete surface protein of Plasmodium falciparum. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA 102, 13598-603.
D. C. Soares, D. L. Gerloff, N. R. Syme, A. F. W. Coulson, J. Parkinson and P. N. Barlow (2005). Large-scale modelling as a route to multiple surface comparisons of the CCP module family. Prot. Eng. Des. Sel. 18, 379-88.
R. J. Orton, W. I. Sellers and D. L. Gerloff (2004). YETI: Yeast Exploration Tool Integrator (www.yetibio.com). Bioinformatics 20, 284-285.
F. Kippert and D. L. Gerloff (2004), Timeless and Armadillo - a link too far [comment]. Curr. Biol. 14, R650-R651.
R. Schmid and D. L. Gerloff (2004). Functional properties of the alternative NADH:ubiquinone oxidoreductase from E.coli through comparative modelling. FEBS Letts. 578, 163-8