Exploring the Protein Universe with Multimers, Motifs & Interfaces

Title: Exploring the Protein Universe with Multimers, Motifs & Interfaces

Speaker:  A/Prof Martin Steinegger, Seoul National University  

Abstract: The rapid rise of highly accurate structure predictors has transformed our ability to explore proteins at a global scale. With billions of predicted structures available, new opportunities emerge to study not only monomers, but also multimer organization, conserved structural motifs, and protein–protein interfaces. In this talk, I will present our fast computational methods Foldseek-Multimer, Folddisco, and Foldseek-Interface, which enable large-scale search, comparison, and clustering across these structural layers. By integrating multimeric assemblies, structural motifs, and interaction interfaces, we can systematically map functional space, annotate previously uncharacterised proteins, and gain new insights into protein evolution and biological mechanisms.

Bio: Dr. Steinegger is an Associate Professor in the Biology Department at Seoul National University, with a joint appointment to the Interdisciplinary Program in Bioinformatics. He conducted his doctoral studies at the Max Planck Institute for Biophysical Chemistry and was awarded a Ph.D. in computer science with summa cum laude honors from the Technical University of Munich in 2018, followed by a postdoctoral fellowship at Johns Hopkins University. Dr. Steinegger has published more than 50 papers covering a wide range of topics in bioinformatics, from detecting genomic assembly contamination to organizing the protein structure space. In 2024 he was awarded the Overton Prize for outstanding contributions to computational biology by the International Society for Computational Biology. He started his research group in 2020, focusing on the development of methods to analyze massive genomics and proteomic datasets. The group’s contributions to bioinformatics include widely used tools for predicting structures (ColabFold/AlphaFold2), clustering (Linclust), assembling (Plass), and searching sequences (MMseqs2) and protein structures (Foldseek). His group’s software and web services have been installed and used millions of times. Dr. Steinegger is an advocate for internationality at his home institution, open science and open source.