Texas A AgriLife Researchers Utilize AI to Map Mitochondrial Protein Interactions, Uncovering Disease Targets
Scientists at Texas A&M AgriLife Research, including Abhinav Swaminathan, Ph.D., and Vishal Gohil, Ph.D., have successfully employed an artificial intelligence (AI) tool, AlphaFold-Multimer (AFM), to map interactions among human mitochondrial proteins. Mitochondria, the energy centers of human cells, contain approximately 1,100 proteins, with nearly 30% linked to diseases like cancer, Parkinson's, Alzheimer's, and rare metabolic disorders. Traditional laboratory methods for identifying protein functions are time-consuming. The research team screened over 630,000 possible protein pairings and identified 2,895 likely interactions, more than half of which were previously unreported. This AI-driven approach, detailed in 'The predicted interactome of the human mitochondrial proteome' published in Nature Communications, has provided insights into the functions of 85 previously uncharacterized proteins by identifying their probable partners. Laboratory experiments over two years confirmed several predicted partne...
