Dr. Florence Tama
Department of Molecular Biology
The Scripps Research Institute
La Jolla, CA

Wednesday, March 10, 2004
11:00 am (CT)
3269 Beckman Institute

Abstract

Normal mode analysis (NMA) is a powerful technique to investigate dynamics of biological systems. Recent developments in this field, such as elastic normal mode theory, allow calculations for very large molecular assemblies such as viruses and the ribosome. We will first discuss the methodologies we have been developing to perform NMA of biological macromolecules with a multi-scale representation. Applications to the ribosome, myosin and virus will be presented. We will show that information obtained from NMA can complement experimental observations for a deeper understanding of the functional transitions of these systems. We then use NMA for flexible docking of high-resolution structures into low-resolution structures, the latter obtained from electron microscopy.