City College of CUNY
Department of Chemistry
Biochemistry Seminar
Wednesday, March 15, 2000
Room J1027
11:15 AM
Ronald Levy
Professor of Chemistry
Rutgers, the State University
Modeling Protein Folding, Binding, and Dynamics with Connections to
NMR Relaxation Experiments
Abstract
My talk will cover two topics: In the first part, I will discuss our recent work on implicit solvent models for protein folding and ligand binding. We have used explicit solvent simulations to parameterize the polar and nonpolar terms of the "Surface Generalized Born" (SGB) solvation model. This work lead to some interesting insights about solution chemistry - for example why solute accessible surface area is not sufficient to parameterize nonpolar solvation. We have applied the SGB model to the "decoy problem", discriminating correctly folded from misfolded protein structures and I will summarize our results. In the second part of the talk I will discuss our use of "MARGE" (Marginal probability densities) to extract information about protein diffusional anisotropy and dynamics from NMR relaxation experiments.

Coffee and TeaLecture begins promptly
11:15 AM11:25 AM