Engineering faculty member receives NIH award to shed light on 'dark' protein families

Debswapna Bhattacharya, assistant professor of computer science and software engineering and Ginn Faculty Achievement Fellow, has won the Maximizing Investigators’ Research Award, or MIRA, from the National Institutes of Health, or NIH.

Bhattacharya received the MIRA, which grants $1.86 million over five years, for his project which aims to develop novel computational and data-driven methods to structurally annotate the “dark” protein families – protein families that are undiscovered by modern structure determination techniques and are inaccessible to molecular modeling. The study aims to gather key information in the understanding of biological systems at the molecular level.

“Nearly a quarter of protein families are currently dark, where molecular conformation is completely unknown,” Bhattacharya said. “The key challenge is how to shed light on this unknown protein universe to gain a comprehensive understanding of biology and disease, thereby paving the way to structure-based drug design at a genomic scale.”

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