ICRF - The postdoctoral worker supported on this project.will be based in Dr Sternberg's group at the ICRF, where PROGOL will be installed any run. Dr Sternberg's entire research career has concentrated on understanding and predicting protein topology. He is Laboratory Head at the ICRF with a group of about eight. He has had a strong interest in applying computer technology to help understand and interrogate the wealth of data in protein structure. Over the last seven years he has collaborated with Dr Muggleton and colleagues on machine learning (see above). The present interest of his group include analysis of protein domain folds and protein prediction. Consequently, other members at the ICRF would provide software in the establishment of the database and the expertise in evaluation of the rules.
Oxford - Dr Muggleton's group are continuing to develop PROGOL for knowledge mining and will make any necessary changes required for its application to this problem. Additionally, the group would use the knowledge gained from this work to progress the development of PROGOL as a knowledge mining engine. Dr Muggleton has been researching into the area of machine learning for ten years. He was one of the founders of the field of inductive logic programming and has developed the systems CIGOL, GOLEM (Muggleton & Feng, 1990) and PROGOL (Muggleton, 1995). He has applied these systems to diverse application including structural biology (see above), finite element mesh analysis, satellite diagnosis and natural language grammar acquisition.
Glaxo-Wellcome - Drs Saqi and Sayle from Dr Lyall's Bioinformatics group at Glaxo will collaborate on the project. Both are experienced in computational aspects of protein structure. In particular they will assist in i) the generation of the protein database; ii) the evaluation of the improvements to protein secondary and tertiary structure prediction that can be obtained from these rules; and iii) the development of the Web server. This work will complement our existing collaboration on the development of an approach to threading.
Smithkline Beecham (SKB) - Dr Rawlings, previously head of Biomedical informatics at the ICRF, has just started as head of Bioinformatics at SKB (Harlow). This proposal is an extension of the work his group pioneered in establishing a PROLOG database of protein topology (Rawlings et al., 1985; Clark et al., 1991) . Dr Rawlings will act as a consultant to the project. In addition as this area remains one of his research interests, as his group at SKB becomes established, they could become more involved in the work.