Protein folding as a system for biologically-inspired physics

Date/Time
Date(s) - 05/12/2007
3:15 pm - 4:15 pm

Title: Protein folding as a system for biologically-inspired physics

Speaker: Dr. Steven Plotkin

Institute: University of British Columbia

Location: ABB 102

Description:

The protein folding problem has occupied the minds of a diverse group of scientists for about the last half-century. In this time, much progress has been made and many questions answered. In the first half of this talk, I will survey how the application of fundamental physical principles have helped us understand some of the central problems of protein folding. In the second half of the talk I will pose and then answer a specific outstanding question in biomolecular self-organization and structural comparison, namely how to generalize the notion of distance to higher dimensional objects such as polymers.
Finally I will discuss applications of this metric to the protein folding problem.