From a nursing-home visit to an IEEE paper on how the gut metabolizes drugs
Meera built a structure-aware computational pipeline to find the gut bacteria responsible for breaking down a widely prescribed class of sedatives. Existing tools search by sequence similarity alone and miss enzymes that look different but fold the same way. Her method combined calibrated profile hidden Markov models with structural homology search across 2,503 candidates, recovering 35 fold-conserved enzymes that sequence search alone could not see, 34 of which kept the binding pocket the reaction requires. Molecular docking then narrowed it to a shortlist for lab testing.
An eleventh grader at Cypress Ranch High School in Texas who had done some computational work on ALS, but had never taken a project of her own from question to peer review.
First-author paper accepted for presentation and publication at the 10th IEEE I-SMAC conference, to appear in IEEE Xplore.
“I'm excited about the freedom it gives me to pursue whatever type of research interests me the most. What I want most is a real understanding of what good research entails, how to write a quality paper, and how to work with new computational tools.”