The Indian Institute of Technology Bombay is organizing an Institute Colloquium on February 3, 2025.
 
The details of the colloquium are provided below:

Title: 'Fifty Years of Bioinformatics and Protein Structures'

Speaker: Prof. Dame Janet Thornton, Director Emeritus, European Molecular Biology Laboratory -European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI), Wellcome Genome Campus, Hinxton, Cambridgeshire, UK

About the Speaker:
Prof. Dame Janet Thornton is Director Emeritus at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory's European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI) on the Wellcome Genome Campus at Hinxton, near Cambridge, UK. She was Director of the Institute from 2001-2015. She studied for her PhD at the National Institute for Medical Research at Mill Hill after graduating as a physicist. After a post-doc in Oxford, Prof. Thornton moved to London (Birkbeck and later UCL) before becoming Director at EMBL-EBI. Prof. Thornton's research is focused on proteins, especially their structure, function, and evolution. She is a computational biologist, working at the interface of biology with physics, chemistry, and computing. This includes a detailed analysis of enzyme biocatalysts, their mechanisms and the evolution of new functions. Her group is also investigating the molecular basis of ageing. She has published over 500 scientific papers, was elected to the Royal Society in 1999, and is a Foreign Associate of US National Academy of Sciences. In 2012 she became a Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire for services to bioinformatics.

Speaker's webpage: https://www.ebi.ac.uk/people/person/janet-thornton/

Abstract:
The last 50 years have seen a revolution in our understanding of proteins and how they work in 3D. This has been enabled by the development of many new experimental technologies, notably our ability to sequence DNA quickly and cheaply. These experimental developments have been matched by the development of sophisticated computational tools (notably AI) and databases using powerful computers to help in determining protein structures and also in curating, analysing, comparing, and predicting their structures. In this talk, I will focus on our collective progress in understanding more about these molecules of life, from the handful of structures determined in 1974 to our current knowledge of the complex world of proteins. I will conclude by describing some of our own recent work on exploring enzyme catalysis. I will highlight (i) our current knowledge of the universe of protein structures, (ii) The development of tools for annotating structures, (iii) wwPDB & PDBe; EMDB & EMPIAR, AFDB, (iv) Protein structure prediction & AI, (v) Computational Enzymology, and (vi) The impact & the future?

This visit by Prof Janet Thornton is supported by the Sarojini Damodaran fellowship for Academic Visitors of Excellence funded by Shibulal Philanthropic Initiative and Shibulal family under the aegis of 'Tata Institute of Fundamental Research.'