Call for collaboration: calcium site predictions in need of validation

Time to walk the walk? ;)

I work in a bioinformatics lab, and one of our major projects is protein function modeling and prediction from structure. This means that we often come up with predictions, but have little in the way of experimental validation. A small project done by a post-doc in the lab is looking like it could turn into a paper, and what could really give it the juice it (and many bioinformatics papers) needs to target a top tier journal would be validation in a living system.

In brief, we have a list of predictions for potentially novel calcium-binding sites in known calcium-binding proteins (i.e. new sites in addition to the ones already known) that we would like to validate. Probably only 2 or 3 validations would be sufficient. Since these proteins already bind calcium, some kind of quantitative assay on mutant versions of the proteins may be necessary (e.g. protein X normally binds this much calcium, mutate the loop predicted to bind and show that it now binds less).

If you or anyone you know is interested in collaborating with her to validate some of her predictions experimentally, please shoot me an email or respond here. Suggestions welcome, too!