Nurcan Tunçbağ

Nurcan Tunçbağ is a Professor of Chemical and Biological Engineering at Koç University. She works on computational models of complex biological systems. Tunçbağ is a 2019 L'Oréal-UNESCO For Women in Science International Rising Talent.

Nurcan Tunçbağ
Alma materIstanbul Technical University
Koç University
AwardsL'Oréal-UNESCO For Women in Science Award
Scientific career
InstitutionsMassachusetts Institute of Technology
Middle East Technical University

Early life and education

Tunçbağ studied chemical engineering at Istanbul Technical University.[1][2] She joined Koç University for her graduate studies, earning a master's degree in computational science and engineering in 2007.[1][3][4][5] She remained there for her doctoral studies, studying protein interactions and their incorporation into protein interaction networks.[6] She worked under the supervision of Özlem Keskin and Attila Gursoy. In 2010, Tunçbağ joined Massachusetts Institute of Technology as a postdoctoral associate with Ernest Fraenkel.[4][7] In 2014, Tunçbağ joined the Middle East Technical University Informatics Institute.[1][4] She is the PI of the Network Modeling Lab at Koç University.[8]

Research

Tunçbağ works on computational models of complex biological systems. She was in the developer team of the PRISM (protein interactions by structural matching) algorithm that can be used to predict protein–protein interactions and assembly.[9] PRISM can be used to construct cellular pathways and proteome annotation.[9] The algorithm can be used to identify 'hot spot' protein binding regions, which can be used to target drugs.[2]

Regulatory and signalling networks are essential for cellular function, but omic data is often of poor quality. Tunçbağ has demonstrated how this data can be analysed using a prize collecting Steiner tree, analysing changes in networks during disease.[10][11] She can incorporate pharmaceutical and biological agents into her algorithm to help inform future therapeutics.[12] With Fraenkel, Tunçbağ created SteinerNet, a web server that allowed the integration of omic data.[13] Users provide information about proteins and genes that have been experimentally detected, and the server looks for connections in the data using a series of interactomes.[13][14] She was also in the developer team of Omics Integrator software that integrates multi-omic data to reconstruct signaling networks.

Tunçbağ looks to identify how the genome is altered during disease.[15] One of the diseases considered by Tunçbağ is Glioblastoma, a particularly malignant brain tumour. Tunçbağ developed a network model that can be used to identify tumour pathway-level changes.[16] She has also worked on neurodegenerative diseases including Parkinson's disease.[17] She was made an Associate Professor in 2017.[18]

Awards and honours

References
  1. Kadınları, Bilim (2018-10-15). "Nurcan Tunçbağ". Medium. Retrieved 2019-03-16.
  2. "Uluslararası çevrelerin de dikkatini çekti". www.haberturk.com (in Turkish). 11 February 2019. Retrieved 2019-03-16.
  3. Keskin, Ozlem; Tuncbag, Nurcan; Gursoy, Attila (2008). "Characterization and prediction of protein interfaces to infer protein-protein interaction networks". Current Pharmaceutical Biotechnology. 9 (2): 67–76. doi:10.2174/138920108783955191. hdl:11511/32640. ISSN 1873-4316. PMID 18393863. S2CID 25155774.
  4. Keskin, Ozlem; Tuncbag, Nurcan; Gursoy, Attila (2016-04-27). "Predicting Protein–Protein Interactions from the Molecular to the Proteome Level". Chemical Reviews. 116 (8): 4884–4909. doi:10.1021/acs.chemrev.5b00683. ISSN 0009-2665. PMID 27074302.
  5. "Hacettepe University Department of Computer Engineeringi". www.cs.hacettepe.edu.tr. Archived from the original on 2016-03-27. Retrieved 2019-03-16.
  6. Tunçbağ, Nurcan (2010). Multi-scale Analysis and Prediction of Protein-protein Interactions. Koç University.
  7. "Nurcan Tuncbag | Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) - Academia.edu". mit.academia.edu. Retrieved 2019-03-16.
  8. "Welcome to the Network Modeling Lab! – NetLAB - Network Modeling Lab". mistral.ii.metu.edu.tr. Retrieved 2019-03-16.
  9. Tuncbag, Nurcan; Gursoy, Attila; Nussinov, Ruth; Keskin, Ozlem (2011-08-11). "Predicting protein-protein interactions on a proteome scale by matching evolutionary and structural similarities at interfaces using PRISM". Nature Protocols. 6 (9): 1341–1354. doi:10.1038/nprot.2011.367. ISSN 1750-2799. PMC 7384353. PMID 21886100.
  10. "Nurcan Tuncbag, Ph.D." (PDF). MIT. Archived from the original (PDF) on 2015-01-05. Retrieved 2019-03-16.
  11. Tuncbag, Nurcan; Braunstein, Alfredo; Pagnani, Andrea; Huang, Shao-Shan Carol; Chayes, Jennifer; Borgs, Christian; Zecchina, Riccardo; Fraenkel, Ernest (2013-02-01). "Simultaneous Reconstruction of Multiple Signaling Pathways via the Prize-Collecting Steiner Forest Problem". Journal of Computational Biology. 20 (2): 124–136. doi:10.1089/cmb.2012.0092. PMC 3576906. PMID 23383998.
  12. "Nurcan Tuncbag - Personal Web Page". Nurcan Tuncbag - Personal Web Page. Retrieved 2019-03-16.
  13. Fraenkel, Ernest; Huang, Shao-shan Carol; McCallum, Scott; Tuncbag, Nurcan (2012-07-01). "SteinerNet: a web server for integrating 'omic' data to discover hidden components of response pathways". Nucleic Acids Research. 40 (W1): W505–W509. doi:10.1093/nar/gks445. ISSN 0305-1048. PMC 3394335. PMID 22638579.
  14. "Fraenkel Lab - SteinerNet Configurator". fraenkel-nsf.csbi.mit.edu. Retrieved 2019-03-16.
  15. "2. EBAT Kongresi". ebatcongress.org. Retrieved 2019-03-16.
  16. Fraenkel, Ernest; Sarkaria, Jann N.; White, Forest M.; Iyekegbe, Dennis O.; Simona Dalin; Sio, Terence T.; Johnson, Hannah; Pokorny, Jenny L.; Milani, Pamela (2016-06-29). "Network Modeling Identifies Patient-specific Pathways in Glioblastoma". Scientific Reports. 6: 28668. Bibcode:2016NatSR...628668T. doi:10.1038/srep28668. ISSN 2045-2322. PMC 4926112. PMID 27354287.
  17. "New clues on the base of Parkinson's disease, other 'synucleinopathies'". ScienceDaily. Retrieved 2019-03-16.
  18. "ASSOC. PROF. DR. NURCAN TUNÇBAĞ" (PDF). Retrieved 19 January 2022.
  19. "2. EBAT Kongresi". ebatcongress.org. Retrieved 2019-03-16.
  20. onur. "2017 Yılı Ödülleri – ODTÜ Prof.Dr.Mustafa.N.Parlar Eğitim ve Araştırma Vakfı" (in Turkish). Retrieved 2019-03-16.
  21. "UNESCO L'OREAL Ulusal Genç Bilim Kadınlarına Destek Bursu Doç. Dr. Nurcan Tunçbağ | Enformatik Enstitüsü". ii.metu.edu.tr. Retrieved 2019-03-16.
  22. Akademisi, Türkiye Bilimler. "TÜBA-GEBİP Üyesi Doç. Dr. Açılan'a, L'Oréal&UNESCO'dan "Bilim Kadınları İçin 2018 Ödülü" | Türkiye Bilimler Akademisi". tuba.gov.tr (in Turkish). Retrieved 2019-03-16.
  23. "4 TÜBA-GEBİP Awards Granted to METU | Graduate School of Informatics". ii.metu.edu.tr. Retrieved 2019-03-16.
  24. "21st edition of the L'Oréal-UNESCO international awards for women in science". UNESCO. 2019-03-13. Retrieved 2019-03-16.
  25. "Global Young Academy welcomes new members from 30 countries around the world". Global Young Academy. 2020-03-24. Retrieved 2020-04-07.
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