Diana Drennan, Ph.D
Postdoctoral Fellow, Pharmacology Department
University of Medicine and Dentistry of NJ-RWJMS
675 Hoes Lane, Piscataway, NJ, 08854
work: (732) 235-3236     fax: (732) 235-4073    drennadj@umdnj.edu

Current research interests ( I split my time between two PIs):

PI - William Welsh
A) Structure-based drug design for a newly discovered tyrosine kinase implicated in cancer.  During this project, I docked several standards into a homology model I built using a variety of in silico docking and scoring methods.  I then used the correlations of these results with the experimental IC50s of the standards to choose the best method of docking and scoring for this protein.  This method was then used to rank the results of the in virtual screening I performed for further laboratory testing of potential drug leads.

B) Planning, organizing and teaching a new bioinformatics certificate program, including courses in: fundamentals of bioinformatics, structural bioinformatics I (small molecules), structural bioinformatics II (macromolecules), and bioinformatic platforms and application development.

PI - Alexey Ryazanov
A) Computational study of a new family of protein kinases with no sequence homology to conventional protein kinases: alpha-kinases.

*BLAST / PHI-BLAST
*multiple sequence alignment of family
*manual editing of alignment
*multiple structural alignment of entire protein kinase superfamily
*phylogenic trees of alpha-kinase family and protein kinase superfamily
*analyzed alignments for conservation of important motifs
*analysis of sequence, structure and conserved motifs to explain and predict substrate/inhibitor specificity.
B) Homology modeling of several members of the family and docking their nucleotide and peptide substrates.

My CV

Introduction to the GAS-P algorithm , which I cowrote with Peter C. Kahn, in FORTRAN.

I am available to come give a talk about GAS-P: Abstract  Outline


 

Backbone representation of trypsin (1tld) with axial segments calculated by GAS-P.  Red segments indicate helical geometry, yellow segments indicate strand geometry, blue segments indicate aperiodic geometry.  Active site is in cleft between two beta-barrels.