Shoba Ranganathan

Biography

Professor at Macquarie University

Research Interest

Shobas research interests are in the area of computational biology and bioinformatics. Specific examples of her recent research are outlined below. Alternative splicing: Alternative pre-mRNA splicing is an important mechanism for controlling gene expression in higher eukaryotes. A single gene produces several functionally diverse proteins by alternative usage of exons or introns within pre-mRNA transcripts. These gene products can be specific to tissue, developmental stage, and disease state. We have pioneered the use of graph theory for genome-wide analysis of alternative splicing in the fruitfly, chicken compared to mouse and human and more recently, the cow, contributing to the annotation of the bovine genome as well as where the cow can be used as a model for human diseases. Immunoinformatics: Major histocompatibility complexes (MHC) play a vital role for antigen presentation and recognition by binding immunogenic peptide epitopes (p) and forming peptide-MHC (pMHC) complexes, for recognition by T cell receptors (TR), culminating in T cell activation. For efficient vaccine design and to minimize experimental T cell binding assays, advanced computational strategies for predicting strong MHC-binding epitopes with high propensity to activate T cells are required. By developing a fast accurate method for pMHC binding and analysing the physicochemical basis of TR binding to pMHC, we can accurately predicted T cell epitopes amongst high-binders for disease-implicated human MHC alleles.