Corinna Vehlow: Excellent Master Thesis Defended

Corinna Vehlow yesterday finished her study of Computational Visualistics with an excellent defense of her Master thesis “Visualization Toolkit for Contact Density Potentials within Amino Acid Neighborhoods in Protein Structures”. She carried out her Master project at the Max-Planck-Institute for Molecular Genetics in the Bioinformatics/Structural Proteomics group headed by Dr. Michael Lappe. Her work aims at supporting prediction of the folding of protein structures. As a prerequisite, Corinna had to dive deeply in molecular cell biology to understand the chemical and spatial structure of proteins as well as their function. She also had to understand, not only the basics, but also current research questions and to derive requirements for her tool. The core of the thesis is the design and development of a toolkit which incorporates assumptions and probabilities for interactions between amino acid residues. The 3D information was projected in a Contact Map which supports the investigations of biologists. Informal feedback of the users clearly indicates that additional insights are gained with her toolkit. A journal paper summarizing the major results is currently under review. Her thesis, written in excellent English, was graded with 1.0 from both reviewers.

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