Peter Wolynes
D.R. Bullard-Welch Foundation Professor of Science, Department of Chemistry, Rice University
3:30 p.m. Colloquium Tea, Hurley Globe
4:15 p.m. Lecture, 127 Hayes-Healy Center
Protein folding can be understood as a biased search on a funneled but rugged energy landscape. The funneled nature of the protein energy landscape is a consequence of natural selection. Prof. Peter Wolynes of Rice University will discuss how this rather simple picture quantitatively predicts folding mechanism from native structure and sequence. He will also discuss recent advances using energy landscape ideas to create algorithms capable of predicting protein tertiary structure from sequence, protein binding sites and the nature of structurally specific protein misfolding relevant to disease. Finally, he will compare the physical folding energy landscape with the apparent fitness landscape of evolution as inferred from large genomic data sets.
This lecture is sponsored by the Charles Edison Lecture Series.