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Researchers led by Baylor College of Medicine have developed a new computational method to study the function of disease-causing genes, starting with an important new discovery about a gene associated with malaria – one of the biggest global health burdens.

The work published today in the current issue of the journal Cell includes collaborators comprised of computational and evolutionary biologists and leading malaria experts from Baylor, Columbia University Medical Center, Princeton University, Pennsylvania State University and the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID).

"Today, rapidly falling costs means that high throughput sequencing projects are revealing the entire gene sequences of ever more species, but the biological functions of most of these genes remain unknown,” said Dr. Olivier Lichtarge, professor of molecular and human genetics and director of the Computational and Integrative Biomedical Research Center at Baylor and senior author of the report. “To address this problem, our lab has developed new methods to predict gene and protein functions."

Dr. Andreas Martin Lisewski, an instructor in Lichtarge’s lab at Baylor, served as the leading author on the report.