Greyson Walker
My Projects
I have worked on multiple projects dealing with physics, chemistry, biology, and computer science, and presented my work at conferences to show my research to the scientific community.
Design of Peptide Amphiphiles for Selective Aggregation in Stapholococcus Aureus Membranes
Antibiotic resistance is rapidly becoming ones of the world's greatest health threats. Overuse of currents treatments has allowed many species of bacteria to develop resistances to antibiotics. Because of this, there is a major need to develop new antibiotics. Alongside my research advisor at KSU, Dr. Jeffrey Comer, we have been studying the affects of a class of molecules called amphipathic peptides that have shown promise in selective disruption of bacterial membranes. We studied bacterial (Staphylococcus aureus) and mammalian membranes with molecular dynamics simulations order to better understand these effects. This has been an ongoing research project for 3 years now and we hope to get our results published by the end of 2025.
Restriction Modification System Protein Identification with Deep Learning
Restriction Modification (RM) System proteins act as bacteria defensive systems against foreign DNA. Being able to reliably identify RM Systems in bacteria reliably would serve great purpose in the understanding these proteins, help fight antibiotic resistance, assist in biotechnology applications, and more.
Because of this, while working in the Crook Lab at North Carolina State University, I developed a Deep Learning AI model in order to determine a type of protein based off an amino acid sequence. This model used multiple neural network layers to understand the complex relationships between a protein and its amino acid sequence.
This project used a combination of existing bacterial genome annotation software Prokka to get possible RM proteins from genomes, then confirm these reads with a deep learning model.
