Computational Discovery of Protein-Protein Interactions (PPI) in the Mental Health and Inflammation Interactome

Computational Biology

This research aims to develop systematically designed computational algorithms to discover the human mental health and inflammation (MHAIN) interactome — the network of PPIs where at least one of the two proteins is involved in either brain or inflammation. The PPI network can help us understand the molecular mechanisms behind the mind-body processes of mental health, diseases, and the modulations of psycho-neuro-inflammo processes by each other. There is a critical need to discover the PPIs involved in brain and behavior, and to apply systems biology methods to study these processes. We employ proactive and transfer learning to discover once unknown interactions, and mine the network to generate hypotheses of system-level interconnects.