Professor Yang Zhang
Computational Medicine & Bioinformatics / Biological Chemistry
The University of Michigan
Ann Arbor, MI

Monday, October 8, 2018
3:00 pm (CT)
3269 Beckman Institute

Abstract

Protein structure prediction aims to determine the spatial location of every atom in protein molecules from the amino acid sequence by computational simulations. In this talk, we first review recent progress in computer-based protein structure prediction and show that the problem can be solved in principle by template-based modeling in case that threading could recognize the best structural templates from the Protein Data Bank. Next, we discuss the structure prediction results in the community-wide blind CASP experiments and show that new approaches combining ab initio folding and deep-learning based contact-map prediction can break through the barrier of physics-based protein folding, which resulted in successful folding of proteins larger than 200 residues. Finally, we summarize the major challenges of the field in ab initio folding, structure refinement, and the modeling of membrane proteins.