Andrew C R Martin

My main interests are in the sequence, structure and function of antibodies, and in the effects of mutation on protein structure and function. We also develop widely-used software for Bioinformatics.

I have worked on the analysis and modelling of antibodies since my D.Phil. and developed the first automated modelling package for antibodies which was sold by Oxford Molecular. We have analysed and predicted the packing between light and heavy variable domains and developed measures of the 'humanness' of antibodies. More recently we have developed abYsis, an online database of pre-numbered antibody sequences and structures with analysis tools and abYmod, a new antibody modelling package.

Our SAAPdap and SAAPpred software examines the local effects of mutations on protein structure and predicts whether mutations will lead to disease. In our hands, SAAPpred outperforms well-known software such as SIFT and PolyPhen-2 as well as more recent software such as FATHMM. We have also developed a specialised version which predicts hypertrophic versus dilated cardiomyopathy from mutations in cardiac beta-myosin.

We have developed a large number of software tools for bioinformatics, particularly programs for dealing with protein structure. We have released Bioplib, a library of code in C for handling proteins and Bioptools, a set of tools based on this for manipulating protein structures. ProFit, our protein least-squares fitting program, has been downloaded over 8000 times.