Interatómica da cavidade oral

Abstract

The human oral cavity is a complex ecosystem where host, microbial and environmental factors interact in a dynamic equilibrium. Understanding the biology of oral cavity and disorders affecting it depends on bioinformatics tools to compile, integrate and apply the information generated by high-throughput techniques such as proteomics, which is dedicated to the identification of all the expressed proteins. The understanding of the molecular mechanisms that take place in the oral cavity is based on the interaction between molecules present. The knowledge of these mechanisms has applications in physiology and pathophysiology of oral cavity system. In order to address the need for studying genes and proteins in an integrated way, by emphasizing the interactions established, inteatomic databases that include known and algorithmically predicted interactions, associated to a confidence index, began to be developed. This work contributes to the improvement of an algorithm allowing the determination of protein-protein interactions based on the structural information and interactions previously described between the various domains of the proteins (OralInt). This study aims to describe the results of applying the algorithm OralInt to the set of proteins identified by proteomics techniques as in the oral cavity using the OralOme database and to check if some of the interactions described in the literature and determined experimentally in the oral cavity, are present in the predictions. The development of bioinformatics tools that allow the proposal of protein-protein interactions in the oral cavity may provide enormous information that will have implications on the understanding of the molecular mechanisms occurring in the oral cavity in physiological and pathological situations. Only with the knowledge of the microorganisms that inhabit the oral cavity, the molecules produced by them and the interactions with the host, can we reach the molecular understanding of the oral cavity

Date of Award	2014
Original language	Portuguese
Awarding Institution	Universidade Católica Portuguesa
Supervisor	Maria José Correia (Supervisor) & Joel Arrais (Co-Supervisor)