Md. Altaf-Ul-Amin, Ph.D., Associate Professor Nara Institute of Science and Technology (NAIST), Japan, gave a talk on “Development and Mining of a Volatile Organic Compound Database” 27th March, 2016 (Sunday)  at 5 PM at the IICT Seminar Room. The talk was jointly organized by Department of Biomedical Engineering (BME) and Institute of Information and Communication Technology (IICT), BUET.

Abstract
Title: Development and Mining of a Volatile Organic Compound Database

Volatile organic compounds (VOCs) are small molecules that exhibit high vapor pressure under ambient conditions and have low boiling points. Although VOCs contribute only a small proportion of the total metabolites produced by living organisms, they play an important role in chemical ecology specifically in the biological interactions between
organisms and ecosystems. VOCs are also important in the health care field as they are presently used as a biomarker to detect various human diseases. Information on VOCs is scattered in the literature until now; however, there is still no available database describing VOCs and their biological activities. To attain this purpose, we have developed
KNApSAcK Metabolite Ecology Database, which contains the information on the relationships between VOCs and their emitting organisms. The KNApSAcK Metabolite Ecology is also linked with the KNApSAcK Core and KNApSAcK Metabolite Activity Database to provide further information on the metabolites and their biological activities. Other than database development, we also applied several data mining algorithms to the accumulated data. We show that VOC based classification of microorganisms is consistent with their classification based on pathogenicity. Furthermore, we show that VOCs of similar chemical structure have similar biological activities.

Additionally, in this talk we will discuss briefly about Systems Biology, the KNApSAcK family databases and graph clustering algorithms called DPClus and DPClusO, which we have developed, in our laboratory. Other Points to be discussed:

i. Introduction to Systems Biology
ii. Graph clustering algorithms and its application in protein complex detection
iii. KNApSAcK family databases
iv. Introduction to NAIST
v. Higher education in NAIST and Scholarship

Profile

Md. Altaf-Ul-Amin received B.Sc. degree in electrical and electronic engineering from Bangladesh University of Engineering and Technology (BUET), Dhaka, M.S. degree in electrical, electronic and systems engineering from Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia (UKM) and PhD degree from Nara Institute of Science and Technology (NAIST), Japan. He received the best student paper award in the IEEE 10th Asian Test Symposium. He developed novel graph clustering algorithms called DPClus and DPClusO He previously worked in several universities in Bangladesh, Malaysia and Japan. Currently he is working as an Associate Professor in Computational Systems Biology Lab of NAIST. He is conducting research on network biology, systems biology and biological databases.