Dr. Canan Atılgan will give a seminar entitled “Molecular Machines at Work - Take-Home Messages from a Couple of Proteins” in the NS101-102 Seminar Series. The seminar will be on Wednesday, December 21, at 12:40-13:30 pm in FASS G022. Please join us for this interesting talk.
NS101-102 Family
Molecular Machines at Work - Take-Home Messages from a Couple of Proteins
A molecular machine, also termed nanomachine, is a collection of atoms or at most a few molecules that can produce machine-like motions in response to external stimuli. The best working nanomachines known to mankind all come from nature where it has taken millions of years to perfect their functioning. Human designers are only beginning to get insights from studying these, with the hope of eventually designing synthetic nanomachines for direct use in everyday endeavours. Today, I will tell you the stories of a couple of proteins, studied in detail to discover how they work in the cell environment. One will be a bacterial macromolecule called ferric binding protein which these organisms use to steal away iron from the hosts they infect [1]. The other will be calmodulin which is known to carry out at least two hundred different functions in higher organisms [2]. I will outline simple computational strategies to uncover the workings of these proteins [3,4]. I hope to convince you that some of the most exciting scientific discoveries are yet to be made -- maybe even by you.
[1] C. Atilgan, A.R. Atilgan, "Perturbation-Response Scanning: Ligand Entry-Exit Mechanisms of Ferric Binding Protein," PLoS Comput. Biol., 5, e1000544 (2009).
[2] A.R. Atilgan, A.O. Aykut, C. Atilgan, "Subtle pH differences trigger a single residue for moderating multiple conformations of calmodulin," J. Chem. Phys., 135, 155102 (2011).
[3] C. Atilgan, O.B. Okan, A.R. Atilgan, "Network-based Models as Tools Hinting at Non-evident Protein Functionality," Annu. Rev. Biophys., in press (to be published 4 May 2012).