Professor Willy Wriggers
Laboratories for Biocomputing & Imaging
School of Health Information Sciences & Institute of Molecular Medicine
University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston

Wednesday, June 28, 2006
2:00 pm (CT)
3269 Beckman Institute

Abstract

Advances in modern biophysics depend on an understanding of fundamental cellular processes, most of which involve the actions and interactions of large biomolecular assemblies. Examples currently studied by us are the actomyosin complex in muscle, molecular chaperones, the ribosome complex, apoptosis regulating complexes, virus capsids, and the RNA polymerase complex. Such systems have been called “macromolecular machines” to characterize the complexity and precision of their highly coordinated moving parts. Ideally, such large structures are visualized at the atomic level, but medium resolution data in the 5-25Å resolution range has become increasingly ubiquitous. Our goal is to characterize the structure and functionally relevant motions of these relevant systems across the length scales. The conformational change and biochemical mechanism can be modeled at near-atomic detail within a molecular dynamics simulation framework with amplified collective coordinates.