Málstofa Lífvísindaseturs - Understanding and designing proteins

Málstofa Lífvísindaseturs föstudaginn 30. janúar kl. 12:00 -  13:00 í Árnagarði, stofu 301

Fyrirlesari: Dr. Davide Mercadante, Senior Lecturer in Chemical Sciences, The University of Auckland, New Zealand

Titill: Understanding and designing proteins through experimentally aided computational efforts

Eftir erindið er áhugasömum GPMLS nemendum og nýdoktorum boðið í hádegisverð með Davide á Eiríksdóttir, Gróskur - skráning hér

Ágrip: Evolved to perform a large set of functions related to as many shapes, proteins are the workhorses of life. The ability to understand, control or design proteins is however linked to our capacity to characterize their behavior at an exhaustive level of detail. 

For this, the combination of experiments and simulations represents a powerful coupling. Tackling protein characterization and design solely by experiments is destined to fail. 

Similarly, theoretical protein scientists literally “walk in the dark” without the aid of experiments, which shed light on a meaningful characterization of molecular behavior. 

Within this premise, and especially for the study of protein intrinsic disorder and protein design, computational methods and their tight and direct integration with experiments are paramount. I will overview recent research in my group targeting the understanding and design of proteins, within the spheres of cellular biology and biotechnology. I will span across the methodological advancements proposed for the determination of intrinsically disordered protein dynamics and the design of new proteins, with the talk providing an overview of strategies useful to directly combine experimental and theoretical efforts. 

Starfsferill: After graduating in pharmaceutical biotechnology in Naples Italy, Davide obtained a PhD in Chemistry at The University of Auckland, split between Auckland and Cambridge as a European Molecular Biology fellow. Davide returned to Europe in 2012, to join The Heidelberg Institute for Theoretical Studies in Germany, where he focused on studying protein conformational dynamics using computational methods in the group of Prof. Frauke Gräter. As a computational scientist not afraid of the lab, he then joined the group of Prof. Benjamin Schuler in Zürich in collaboration with Prof. Philipp Selenko at the Weizmann Institute, where he interfaced molecular simulations with single-molecule Förster resonance energy transfer spectroscopy (smFRET) and NMR: keeping a foot in both the experimental and computational worlds. Today, Davide leads a computational biophysics group, developing and employing computational methods targeted towards the investigation molecular dynamics, to ultimately understand and design molecular function.