Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

Quantifying The Structure Of Misfolded Proteins Using Graph Theory, Walter G. Witt

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The structure of a protein molecule is highly correlated to its function. Some diseases such as cystic fibrosis are the result of a change in the structure of a protein so that this change interferes or inhibits its function. Often these changes in structure are caused by a misfolding of the protein molecule. To assist computational biologists, there is a database of proteins together with their misfolded versions, called decoys, that can be used to test the accuracy of protein structure prediction algorithms. In our work we use a nested graph model to quantify a selected set of proteins that …