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Grammatical rules spell out new drugs

Learning the language of antibiotics could help fight superbugs.

By shuffling protein segments like words in a sentence, researchers have created what they hope is a language for finding potent new antibiotics.

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Posted by Nicola Jones on October 18, 2006 06:23 PM |

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I agree with the comments of Robert Hancock. While the results are interesting, this is not a "language based approach" as there is no formal language theory in this work. It is merely a combinatoric shuffling of amino-acids in the peptides in accordance with well-known rules of acceptable substitution, generally based on hydrophobic/phyllic affinity. Compare this with the work of Kay and Shepherd (Oxford Bioinformatics Forum 2003) etc using fomal factorisable languages which seek to identify genuine "words" of the genomic language. That is true "formal language" theory!

Posted by: Professor Simon Shepherd | October 20, 2006 12:01 AM

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