Discovering the Molecular Secrets of Disease

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At Carnegie Mellon, linguistics tools also show great promise for advancing our understanding of disease. Through a $9 million, multi-institutional grant from the National Science Foundation, Raj Reddy, Simon University Professor of Computer Science and Robotics, and Judith Klein-Seetharaman, assistant professor of pharmacology at the University of Pittsburgh and research scientist at Carnegie Mellon’s Language Technologies Institute (LTI), have initiated the development of computational biolinguistics. Collaborators include LTI director and computer science professor Jaime Carbonell and others at Carnegie Mellon, the Center for Computational Biology and Bioinformatics at the University of Pittsburgh, and MIT.

The work is based on the premise that the building blocks of proteins—called amino acids—form sequences that can be read to understand their structure, dynamics and function, just as in languages, where sequences of letters fall into patterns that make them understandable.

“The computational biolinguistics project promises to provide novel views and approaches to solving these challenges that would not be obvious without thinking of them in terms of an analogy between language and biology,” said Klein-Seetharaman.

Carnegie Mellon’s reputation in computational biology continues to grow, thanks to its steady recruitment of talented faculty.

At the vanguard is Dannie Durand, an associate professor of biological sciences and computer science who joined Carnegie Mellon in 2000. Durand carries out computational research to understand gene evolution.

“Carnegie Mellon is a wonderful place for computational biology because it is easy to collaborate with faculty and students in different fields, and unusual approaches are appreciated here.”

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Related Links:
Robert F. Murphy
Merck Computational Biology and Chemistry Program
Mellon College of Science
Computational Biology
Computational Biolinguistics
Jonathan Minden
William Eddy
Michael Erdmann
PEPMORPH
Gordon Rule
Raj Reddy
Judith Klein-Seetharaman
Language Technologies Institute
Jaime Carbonell
Ronald Rosenfeld
Yiming Yang
Richard McCullough
Dannie Durand

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