Past Event

The Society of HPC Professionals past event

Lunch & Learn – August 2019
Physics of Memory and Learning – from the Perspective of Interacting Biomolecules

Held Thursday, Aug 22, 2019

Watch video:

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Abstract:

Calcium (Ca²⁺) signaling is a dynamic system where Ca²⁺ concentration fluctuates in range of 0.1-10μM with time. These short transient Ca²⁺ around the entry sites activate Ca²⁺-binding proteins such as calmodulin (CaM).  The prototypical pathway describes CaM as encoding a Ca²⁺ signal by selectively activating downstream CaM-dependent proteins through molecular binding.  However, CaM’s intrinsic Ca²⁺-binding properties alone appear insufficient to decode rapidly fluctuating Ca²⁺ signals.  It has been proposed that the temporally varying mechanism for producing target selectivity requires CaM-target interactions that directly tune the Ca²⁺-binding properties of CaM through reciprocal interactions.  In this presentation, I will focus on the binding mechanism of CaM and its target, which requires mutually and conformationally-induced changes in both participants   Then, I will focus on two unique and distinct CaM binding targets, neurogranin (Ng) and CaM-dependent kinase II (CaMKII), which are abundant in postsynaptic neuronal cells and are biochemically known to tune CaM’s affinity for Ca²⁺ in opposite directions.  My group has employed an integrative approach of quantum mechanical calculations, all-atomistic molecular dynamics, and coarse-grained molecular simulations to investigate the molecular mechanisms of CaM’s reciprocal interaction between target binding and Ca²⁺binding.  The research of my group has been driven and tested in close collaboration with experimentalists.

I will also discuss about CaM binding and target selection in the context of evolution and in a crowded environment.

Speaker Bio:

Margaret S. Cheung
Department of Physics, University of Houston

Dr. Cheung is the Moores Professor of Physics at the University of Houston. She graduated from the National Taiwan University with a bachelor’s degree in chemistry and received her Ph.D. in physics from the University of California, San Diego. She carried out theoretical biological physics and bioinformatics research as a Sloan Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Maryland and started her lab at the University of Houston in 2006. Dr. Cheung’s research focuses on protein folding inside a cell, calmodulin dependent calcium signaling, protein motors, actomyosin dynamics, and quantum efficiency in organic photovoltaics. She is particularly interested in developing multi-physics models that bridge the dynamics across wide temporal and spatial scales in subcellular biology and materials, and designing computational algorithms that integrate high-performance computing resources across heterogeneous systems. She is a fellow of the American Physical Society, a Senior Scientist at the Center for Theoretical Biological Physics and an Adjunct Professor of Bioengineering at Rice University.