Drug discovery

This project was directed at identifying new biologically active substances, so called lead structures, for the development of drugs by analyzing data pools, such as data bases of molecules, and in particular data bases of naturally occurring molecules.

In the last years, naturally occurring molecules experienced a comeback in drug development. As a result of this comeback different authors have suggested to combine structural elements of interest and have broken down molecules into their base elements. However, these approaches often stalled in view of the sheer complexity of possible combinations. Accordingly, the relatively few tested structures often did not show the desired effect. Thus, there is a need for a method and system that provides substructures of molecules, particularly, of naturally occurring molecules (“host molecules”) with a higher degree of selectivity, that is, with a higher potential of containing or constituting lead drug structures.

This project was a collaboration with Dr. Thomas Wilhelm and is now one of his main topics at his new systems biology group in England. If you want to know more please visit his homepage: Dr. Thomas Wilhelm (IFR Norwich, UK).

A new classification scheme of the genetic code

We present a new classification table of the standart genetic code. In contrast to the 64 fields of the widespread table our scheme is reduced to 24 fields remaining the same information content. The new scheme is based on a codon sorting according to their purines/pyrimidines and the number of formed H-bonds. This sorting not only reduces the number of fields, it also reveals a large number of known and unknown symmetry characteristics of the genetic code. Based on this symmetries and other facts we developed a new hypothesis about the early evolution of translation. We think that in ancient times pre-tRNAs were able to bind the mRNA in both directions (parallel and antiparallel). This would not only explain missing details about the generally believed hypothesis of an ancient doublet code but also give rise to a new hypothesis of accelerated evolution of proteins at the beginning of life. For more information about this topic please read our publications or visit this site: Genetic Code and Evolution of Translation.

This project was a collaboration with Dr. Swetlana Nikolajewa and Dr. Thomas Wilhelm and is published in
J Bioinform Comput Biol. 2006 Apr; 4(2):609-20.