Wing Ki (Catherine) Wong

PhD in Bioinformatics, Scientist in Antibody Development

Antibody Modelling – Immunoinformatics

In the battles with infective diseases, warriors fight to protect their country – your body. They are the (un)known warriors, antibodies.

The specificity of an antibody is determined by its paratope (antigen-binding site), which is mainly made up of complementarity-determining regions (CDRs). There are 3 CDRs on each of the two polypeptide chains (heavy and light chains) of an antibody. The tertiary structures of these regions and the pharmacophore are of interest when we design an antibody to target a specific antigen. Here is a summary of models:

Paratope determination

Epitope determination

Computational Antibody Design

Feature extraction and clustering

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Soft Tissue Mechanics – Constitutive Law

Constitutive laws describe material properties (strains and stresses). Since soft tissues are composed of fibres, which are not aligned, the angles at which the fibres are oriented have an impact on their mechanical properties. Here we consider the contributions from i) along the fibre $ \mathbf{f} $; ii) along the sheet $ \mathbf{s}$; and iii) in normal directions $ \mathbf{n} $.

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Finite Element

How can you tell whether a bridge can bear the load of all the vehicles on it?

Yours skin is stretchy – until a point it breaks. But how far can you stretch your skin before it breaks?

In cases where you can’t repeatedly build a million bridges nor stretch your skin a million times to test your hypothesis, Finite Element Method can provide an estimate, based on the material properties (stiffness, shape etc.).

The Simplest Illustration

Simplex, Linear Elastic

Converting into Weak Form

How it comes about: Finite Deformation

Biological Material Properties: Constitutive Laws

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