National
e-Science
Centre
Professor John Moult Public Talk
e-Science Institute 9th October 03
John Moult's lecture in the Edinburgh Centre for Bioinformatics series was entitled 'SNPs,
databases and disease'. In a talk attended by some 70 people Professor Moult, of the University
of Maryland, described and demonstrated structure and sequence models of the effects of single
nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) on protein structure and function. His findings suggest that
many disease-causing SNPs act by destabilizing protein structure; and that about 1/3 of the
SNPs found in the population and not known to be associated with disease also appear to impair
function at the molecular level. Network level robustness analysis provides insight into the
complex trait properties of common diseases, in which disease susceptibility is a subtle property
of a combination of SNPs and environmental factors.
Dr Anne Payne
College of Science & Engineering
University of Edinburgh