Seminar

Theoretical Aspects of Protein Folding

Dr. Harold A. Scheraga
Cornell University
Ithaca, NY

Monday, October 27, 1997
3:00 pm
3269 Beckman Institute

We are carrying out experimental and theoretical work to try to determine the interatomic interactions that lead a polypeptide chain to fold into the native conformation of a biologically active protein. Most of this seminar will be concerned with our theoretical/computational work. While improvements will no doubt be made in the empirical potential energy functions used in this work, the current ones are sufficiently reliable to enable us to concentrate, for the present, on the conceptually-more-difficult one, viz, global optimization, to surmount the problem that arises from the existence of numerous local minima in the energy landscape. Techniques have been developed to avoid these local minima in the search for the global minimum. Some of the global optimization methods that have been developed to treat the protein folding problem are applicable to other physical problems, e.g., several problems in crystallography.

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