Monday, August 18, 2008

Computer Science Collaborator


Pieter Dorrestein, one of computer science professor Pavel Pevzner's collaborators here at UC San Diego, was featured in a short profile in The Scientist. Dorrestein and Pevzner devised a way to cut the time it takes to determine the structure of peptides derived from natural compounds from six months or a year to as little as one day. This advance may assist drug discovery researchers – who need to know as much as possible as quickly as possible about the natural products with antibiotic, antiviral and other pharmacologically interesting properties that they are probing.

They presented the work RECOMB 2008 (Research in Computational Molecular Biology) on March 31 in Singapore.