Broad Area Colloquium For AI-Geometry-Graphics-Robotics-Vision
Protein Folding: Mathematical, Algorithmic, and Computational Challenges
Michael Levitt
Department of Structural Biology
Stanford Medical School
Monday, Nov 10, 2000, 4:15PM
TCseq200, Lecture Hall A
http://robotics.stanford.edu/ba-colloquium/
Abstract
Protein Folding is one of the most fundamental processes
in all living matter and concerns the transition of a
disordered chemical chain of amino acid residues into a
precisely ordered three-dimensional folded structure that is
then able to carry out all the key biological functions.
The process is a closed problem in that the particular amino
acid sequence to lead to a particular folded shape. It is
complicated by the large number of degrees of freedom that
characterize a protein chain as well as our inexact knowledge
of all the physical forces responsible for the stability of the
folded state.
By looking at the problem from different viewpoints including
experimental, physical, biological, mathematical, algorithmic
and computational we gain insight that has led to some success
in blind predictions of structure from sequence.
About the Speaker
Michael Levitt obtained his Ph.D. in 1971 from the University of Cambridge.
He currently chairs the department of structural biology at Stanford
University. He has held academic positions at the Laboratory of Molecular
Biology in Cambridge, England, the Salk Institute for Biological Studies
in San Diego and Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, Israel. His
recent work focuses on sequence/structure analysis and bioinformatics,
attempting to learn about protein structure and function from the massive
body of genomic sequence data. Specifically he has classified folds in genomic
sequences and compared results of sequence alignment with those of
structure alignment.
bac-coordinators@cs.stanford.edu
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Last modified: Fri Nov 10 14:57:51 PST 2000