FW: NCBI Special SeminarFrom: Saraswathi, Abhiman (NIH/NLM/NCBI) [F]
Sent: Monday, March 30, 2009 11:19 AM
To: NLM/NCBI List ncbi-seminar
Subject: CBB Seminar Tuesday March 31

Speaker: Abhiman Saraswathi

Title: Discovery of BEN domain and analysis of Tautomerase superfamily

Date: 31 March 2009

Time: 11:00 AM

Place: B2 Library, Building 38A

 

I will present the discovery of a new domain family, BEN, present in many animal proteins and 

viral proteins. Based on conserved features and contextual analysis, we predict this domain 

to be involved in protein-DNA or protein-protein interactions during chromatin organisation and transcription. 

 

Tautomerase superfamily is a group of structurally homologous enzymes charachterised by a beta-alpha-beta fold 

building block and is rich in functional diversity, mechanistic, structural and evolutionary questions. 

We carried out extensive sequence and structural analysis to elucidate the evolutionary history and 

functional diversity of the members of this superfamily. I will present our findings about various sequence 

and structural features of different families, the evolution of this superfamily and predicted key residues 

involved in functional specificity of various families.