BioED webinar 18 - Domenico Scaramozzino - Protein functional dynamics

Abstract

Proteins are flexible macromolecules, constantly jiggling and moving around in their crowded biological environment. Protein dynamics is known to be strongly related to the way these tiny nano-machines perform their biological activity. In this context, the low-frequency normal modes extracted from normal mode analysis (NMA) and elastic network models (ENMs) are found to be biologically relevant, as they often point in the directions of the functional conformational changes. By using a computational approach based on ENMs and structural dynamics theory, we observed that applying harmonic random forces onto the protein structure has the ability to trigger the
protein functional motions, as long as the frequency of the perturbation lies in the low-frequency sub-THz range.
This suggests a strong connection between the protein functional dynamics and sub-THz excitations.

Speaker's profile

Domenico Scaramozzino received his PhD in Civil and Environmental Engineering in 2021 at Politecnico di Torino (Italy), where he now works in the Department of Structural, Geotechnical and Building Engineering as a Postdoctoral Researcher in Structural Mechanics. His research interests lie at the interface of Structural Mechanics and Computational Biology, where he is particularly interested in the understanding of protein behavior and the protein structure-dynamics-function relationship. He was also Visiting Scholar at Iowa State University (USA) in the Computational Biology Lab of Robert Jernigan. He is the first author of the short book “Waves in Biomechanics: THz vibrations and modal analysis in proteins and macromolecular structures”, and currently guest editor of the special
issue “Computational approaches for protein dynamics and function” in “Applied Sciences”.

This webinar is also supported by URSI (International Union of Radio Science) and EMB chapter of the Czechoslovakia Section of IEEE