About Amal Alhelal Amal Alhelal M.S. (former), Bioengineering protein function Rare disease bioengineering Biomedical Informatics Amal Alhelal completed her MSc in Bioengineering at KAUST in 2024 under the supervision of Robert Hoehndorf. She was a student in the Bioinformatics and Machine Learning track of the Bioengineering programme, based at the Computational Bioscience Research Center (CBRC), and defended her thesis in May 2024. Her thesis, titled Protein functional domain identification methodology (defended under the working title Exploring the association between protein functional domains and pathogenicity information derived from AI tools), investigated computational approaches to delineate functional domains Projects Related Projects 2022 Computational methods for functional metagenomics: from protein functions to multi-scale interactions Sat, Jan 1 2022 - Tue, Dec 31 2024 Applied Ontology Microbial communities Neuro-Symbolic AI protein function Metagenomic sequencing has made it routine to read the DNA of an entire microbial community, but most analysis pipelines stop at taxonomic composition or at the level of individual protein families. The really biologically informative questions, which proteins do what, which proteins interact, which metabolic pathways are reconstructible, and how the community as a whole interacts with its environment or host, remain largely out of reach computationally. Even associations that are very robust empirically, for example between gut microbiome composition and colorectal cancer or inflammatory
Computational methods for functional metagenomics: from protein functions to multi-scale interactions Sat, Jan 1 2022 - Tue, Dec 31 2024 Applied Ontology Microbial communities Neuro-Symbolic AI protein function Metagenomic sequencing has made it routine to read the DNA of an entire microbial community, but most analysis pipelines stop at taxonomic composition or at the level of individual protein families. The really biologically informative questions, which proteins do what, which proteins interact, which metabolic pathways are reconstructible, and how the community as a whole interacts with its environment or host, remain largely out of reach computationally. Even associations that are very robust empirically, for example between gut microbiome composition and colorectal cancer or inflammatory
