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Computational biology · Master’s thesis

Protein binding affinity with graph features

Using amino acid networks to represent protein interactions and investigate binding affinity.

The problem

Protein interactions depend on structural relationships that are difficult to capture with simple sequence summaries. Graph-based representations provide a way to examine those relationships.

My contribution

I investigated node- and edge-weighted amino acid networks, compared NAPS and NACEN representations, and explored machine learning models for affinity prediction.

  • Engineered graph-based representations of protein complexes.
  • Examined residues and interaction hotspots.
  • Used cross-validation to compare candidate modeling approaches.

What this demonstrates

Domain-informed feature engineering, comparative method evaluation, and translating a biological question into a computational analysis.

This was a thesis-scale study of 101 complexes. It does not establish broad predictive performance beyond the evaluated dataset.