Bio-Informatics seminars

Jan Kosinski explains how AlphaFold-style methods predict protein complexes and why their reliance on evolutionary information makes interactions between host and pathogen proteins especially difficult. The talk reviews large-scale studies, interpreting both successful predictions and failures rather than treating reported success rates as universal performance. It then examines ways to improve predictions through broader sampling, altered sequence alignments and experimental restraints, including crosslinking mass spectrometry, with influenza A virus as a worked research example. The session is suitable for students and researchers interested in host-pathogen interactions and structural bioinformatics; basic knowledge of protein structures and sequence alignments is useful, but prior AlphaFold experience is unnecessary.

This webinar examines reconstruction and use of marine metagenome-assembled genomes. The first part introduces the Ocean Microbiomics Database as a standardized resource for prokaryotic genome-resolved analysis, including co-abundance-based reconstruction, contextual metadata, and relationships between ecological patterns and microbial genomes. The second part considers why eukaryotic genomes are harder to recover: their complexity, low abundance, and limited markers and reference sequences complicate assembly and classification. Participants will compare reconstruction approaches, explore the database, and consider tools and steps for recovering eukaryotic genomes. The session serves academic and industrial researchers developing marine-microbiome applications and infrastructure teams managing samples, data, and discovery resources.

Tim Ebbels presents interpretable machine-learning models for metabolomics and multi-omics using pathway and chemical-class scores. Sparse coverage of the metabolome and uncertain annotations make conventional results difficult to interpret; pathway-based features aim to connect model output directly to biological function. The webinar examines applications from multi-assay mass spectrometry and multi-omics integration to single-cell and mass-spectrometry imaging, discusses methodological challenges and attempts to resolve them, and demonstrates how these approaches can clarify complex biological signals. Online via Zoom. Free for interested life scientists and bioinformaticians, with advance registration required through the Australian BioCommons event page. Tuesday 13 October, 16:00–17:00 AEDT (Australia/Melbourne), equivalent to 05:00–06:00 UTC. The event is subject to the BioCommons Code of Conduct and may be recorded.

This webinar explains how researchers can retrieve and analyse protein information using UniProt. It demonstrates advanced queries, BLAST searches, peptide searches, and multiple-sequence alignments, including how to navigate outputs and use functional annotations to interpret them. It also discusses how identifiers, ontologies, and controlled vocabularies organize biological knowledge, and how identifier mapping connects resources. The session is suitable for scientists at any career stage who want to use UniProt or extend their existing skills; undergraduate-level biology knowledge is helpful.

Open biological data resources connect complementary evidence about proteins involved in infection. Using influenza haemagglutinin, this seminar demonstrates sequence and functional annotations in UniProt, three-dimensional cryo-EM maps in EMDB, and experimental and predicted structures in PDBe and the AlphaFold Protein Structure Database. Participants will learn to browse, retrieve and interpret these data and follow connections between the resources. The session also considers how accessible biological data supports infection research and pandemic preparedness. It is aimed at students and researchers in protein biology, structural biology and bioinformatics; basic knowledge of sequence and structure formats is useful.

Interpreting human missense variants requires connecting genomic coordinates with protein sequences, structures and functional evidence. ProtVar integrates annotations and predictions from UniProt, Ensembl, PDBe, Open Targets and AlphaFoldDB, extending variant lookup to discovery across more than 500 million potential missense variants. This seminar demonstrates natural-language searches using diseases, pathways and drug responses, multi-criteria filtering, structural visualisation and data export. Participants will learn to prioritise variants, interpret their structural and functional effects, and retrieve data through web downloads or the REST API. The session serves geneticists, drug-discovery researchers and computational biologists; undergraduate molecular biology and genetics are recommended.