WFU Physics Colloquium

TITLE: Modeling motor proteins: linking the dynamics and the supporting architecture

SPEAKER: Professor Riina Tehver ,

TIME: Wednesday April 13, 2011 at 4:00 PM

PLACE: Room 101 Olin Physical Laboratory

Living cells include a large number of molecular motors that perform a variety of vital tasks such as muscle contraction, cellular transport, or protein assembly. Many of these motors consume fuel in the form of ATP and undergo cyclical chemical and structural changes that ultimately result in mechanical work. The key to understanding the operation of these machines lies in deciphering how ATP binding, hydrolysis, and release translate into the structural changes. In this talk, I will discuss our computational approaches for examining the details of mechano-chemical coupling in the context of myosin V. I will focus on a method for isolating a network of residues that trigger transitions and dynamic simulations for finding how the myosin architecture regulates its functional movements during the reaction cycle.