Plenary Lecture
In Silico Study of MicroRNA-Regulated Protein-Protein Interaction Modules in Human Disease and Plant Infected with Pathogen Systems
Professor Ka-Lok Ng
Department of Biomedical Informatics
Asia University
Taiwan
E-mail: ppiddi@gmail.com
Abstract: Living organisms are continuously subjected to infection by pathogens including bacteria and viruses. In general, a pathogen invades host in many ways. Many of such mechanisms involve protein-protein interactions (PPIs) in the host. PPIs are fundamental in every aspect of functions of living cells. It plays a crucial role in the infection processes, some critical inter-species interactions such as host-pathogen interactions and pathogenicity occur through PPIs. A strategy to gain a better understanding into the interaction and function of these proteins is to make use of the PPI data, and construct a set of interaction rules for disease proteins. MicroRNAs (miRNAs) are a class of small non-coding RNAs that bind to mRNA and induce either translation repression or mRNA degradation. There have been reports indicated that miRNAs could cause diseases in human or plant. The recent availability of both miRNA and PPI data has made it possible to study human or plant disease at a system level. In this lecture, we will discuss how to integrate the miRNA, mRNA, and PPI records to establish miRNA-regulated modules for both of human cancer and plant-pathogen systems. . This type of tool could assist users in identifying disease-related miRNA targeting pathways. It is expected that these two study cases may provide some significant information to reveal biological processes involve in both of human and plant immunity systems.
Brief biography of the speaker: Dr. Ka-Lok Ng received the Honours diploma in physics from Hong Kong Baptist College in 1983, and the Ph.D. degree in theoretical physics from the Vanderbilt University at USA in 1990. He is a professor at the Department of Biomedical Informatics, Asia University, Taiwan, since August 2008. Beginning from Dec. 2009, he serves on the Editorial board of several international journals. He is the Editor-in-Chief, Associate Editor, Reviewer Editor and Guest Editor of the WSEAS Transactions of Biology and Biomedicine, IST Transactions of Biomedical Sciences and Engineering, Frontiers in Genomic Assay Technology and Current Bioinformatics respectively. Furthermore, he is also actively involved in reviewing manuscripts for international journals. He is the PI of several funded research grants in the last few years on the following research topics, (i) Identifying biological network motifs, (ii) MicroRNA studies–disease-related microRNA, regulation of protein complexes, and network motifs identification, (iii) An in silico and in vivo platform for predicting cancer-related microRNAs, (iv) MicroRNA as Oncogenes and its Targets Protein-protein Interactions. Dr. Ng has published articles in highly ranked journals, in the areas of PPI network, robustness study of biological networks, domain-domain interactions, non-coding RNA, protein function prediction and DNA data hiding method. His research interests include PPI network, mRNA-microRNA expression profile study, cancer-related microRNAs, physio-chemical properties of protein complexes, time series microarray data analysis and host-pathogen PPI studies.