TWO POSITIONS available in Modena for protein-surface related reasearch - INFO
PROSURF WORKSHOP - SESTRI LEVANTE - June 4-6 2009
PROSURF - COMPUTATIONAL TOOLBOX FOR PROTEIN-SURFACE DOCKING
PROJECT DESCRIPTION
Recent combinatorial biotechnologies have shown that the molecular
recognition capability of proteins can be specifically oriented toward
inorganic surfaces. However, at present the principles regulating
protein-surface interactions are poorly understood, thus hindering the
effective exploitation of such specificity in scientific and
technological application. What features of the surface and of the
proteins (electronic, structural, morphological) determine which
protein is able to bind to a given surface and how? PROSURF
will address these issues and develop computational tools to enable
rational design of protein-surface associations.
The project strategy to probe the determinants of protein-surface specificity, and to implement the envisaged computational tools, integrates state-of-the-art computational techniques and experiments. It consists of a series of computational steps, including quantum-mechanics based parameterisation of protein-surface interactions, molecular dynamics simulation of proteins on surfaces, and the implementation of protein-surface docking software, corroborated by tailored experiments. Although the project focus is on theory, feedback from experiments will be important both to validate the computational tools, and to gain new insight into the basis of protein-surface interactions.
last updated February 3rd, 2010