Seminar:

Abstract: Proteins need to fold into their native structures to perform their biological function. Native structures of proteins often change when proteins perform their function and interact with other biomolecules. Thus, structures and dynamics of proteins are critical to get complete pictures of biological protein functions and interpret different experimental data. Knowledge-based methods for protein structure prediction have achieved lots of success but struggle with predicting structures of new protein folds and flexible proteins. In contrast, all-atom molecular dynamics is a nice alternative, but high computational cost limited its applications, especially for large protein complexes. Thus, physics-based coarse-grained models are needed to fill the gaps. This talk will focus on using Dr. Yi He's recently developed knowledge-based methods and physics-based coarse-grained models to predict the structure and dynamics of large protein complexes and flexible proteins.