International students in UK universities often struggle with interactions in English, particularly on their first days in the country. We have developed a multilingual support robot tailored to their needs. To evaluate the performance of the robot, 60 international students asked the robot, in either English or their native language (Modern Standard Arabic or Mandarin Chinese), for support on topics including campus directions, local tax exemption, financial aid, and official documents. Overall, users preferred to use their native language when interacting with the support robot, and using their native language in the robot interaction also had a positive effect on their perception of the interaction itself.

UNLABELLED: Antibody epitope mapping is a key step in understanding antibody-antigen recognition and is of particular interest for drug development, diagnostics and vaccine design. Most computational methods for epitope prediction are based on properties of the antigen sequence and/or structure, not taking into account the antibody for which the epitope is predicted. Here, we introduce PEASE, a web server predicting antibody-specific epitopes, utilizing the sequence of the antibody. The predictions are provided both at the residue level and as patches on the antigen structure. The tradeoff between recall and precision can be tuned by the user, by changing the default parameters. The results are provided as text and HTML files as well as a graph, and can be viewed on the antigen 3D structure. AVAILABILITY AND IMPLEMENTATION: PEASE is freely available on the web at www.ofranlab.org/PEASE. CONTACT: [email protected].

MOTIVATION: Assessing the false positive rate of function prediction methods is difficult, as it is hard to establish that a protein does not have a certain function. To determine to what extent proteins with similar sequences have a common function, we focused on photosynthesis-related proteins. A protein that comes from a non-photosynthetic organism is, undoubtedly, not involved in photosynthesis. RESULTS: We show that function diverges very rapidly: 70% of the close homologs of photosynthetic proteins come from non-photosynthetic organisms. Therefore, high sequence similarity, in most cases, is not tantamount to similar function. However, we found that many functionally similar proteins often share short sequence elements, which may correspond to a functional site and could reveal functional similarities more accurately than sequence similarity. CONCLUSIONS: These results shed light on the way biological function is conserved in evolution and may help improve large-scale analysis of protein function.