May 24, Thursday 14:15, Room Jacobs 665, Jacobs Building

Title: On geometry of the known protein structure universe and a of knowledge based potential for protein structure prediction

Lecturer: Peter Røgen

Lecturer homepage : http://www2.mat.dtu.dk/people/Peter.Roegen/

Affiliation : Technical University of Denmark

Proteins are long chain molecules that fold into beautiful and complicated structures before fulfilling their functions in the living organisms. This talk focus on some mathematical attempts to bring classification of protein native structures from relative comparison to known examples to absolute description of each structure - one step up the scientific evolutionary ladder. In the talk, I will shortly introduce some of the reduced mathematical representations of protein backbones and focus on structural descriptors and on how to use them to give the best possible pseudo metric on the space of all known protein folds. Finally, I will describe some ongoing projects where we optimize a smooth knowledge based potential for gradient based protein structure refinement.