Cathy H. Wu, PhD

Professor of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology
Director of Protein Information Resource
Georgetown University Medical Center
LR-3 Preclinical Science, Box 571455
3900 Reservoir Road, NW
Washington, DC 20057-1455 
Phone: 202 687-1039
Fax: 202 687-1662
wuc@georgetown.edu

Research Interests

Bioinformatics and Proteomics

Research Summary

I am a Professor of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology and the Director of Protein Information Resource (PIR) at the Georgetown University Medical Center. Protein Information Resource provides bioinformatic support that has potential to be highly inclusive of differences in protein expression as a function of sex differences. Trained in both biology and computer science, I have conducted bioinformatics research for over 12 years, developed several protein family classification systems and databases, and led the PIR projects since 1999. PIR is an integrated public resource for protein informatics to support genomic and proteomic research, with its core activity in protein functional annotation. This is part of the UniProt project that aims to produce a single worldwide resource of protein sequence and function by unifying the PIR, Swiss-Prot, and TrEMBL database activities. Other research projects include: iProClass database to provide value-added information for protein family, function, and structure; iProExpress knowledge system for bioinformatics analysis of large-scale gene expression and proteomic data; and a protein name ontology for biomedical literature mining.

Representative Publications

  • Book: Wu, C. H. and McLarty, J. (2000). Neural Networks and Genome Informatics. Methods in Computational Biology and Biochemistry, Volume 1, Series Editor A. K. Konopka, Elsevier Science.
  • Wu, C. H., Yeh, L.-S., Huang, H., Arminski, L., Castro-Alvear, J., Chen, Y., Hu, Z., Kourtesis, P., Ledley, R. S., Suzek, B.E., Vinayaka, C.R., Zhang, J. and Barker, W.C. (2003). The Protein Information Resource. Nucleic Acids Research, 31, 345-347.
  • Wu, C. H., Huang, H., Yeh, L.-S. and Barker, W.C. (2003). Protein family classification and functional annotation. Computational Biology and Chemistry, 27, 37-47.
  • Hirschman, L., Park, J.C., Tsujii, J., Wong, L. and Wu, C. H. (2002). Accomplishments and challenges in literature data mining for biology. Bioinformatics, 18, 1553-1561.
  • Wu, C. H., Zhao, S. and Chen, H. L. (1996). A protein class database organized with ProSite protein groups and PIR superfamilies. Journal of Computational Biology, 3, 547-562.