Prof. Ken Dill (Stony Brook University) will present “How proteins fold, how they don’t, and how to do it in a computer”
Abstract: An old puzzle is whether there is a general mechanism of protein folding — some unified narrative that explains how any protein folds, no matter what it’s native structure is, that would also explain the 8 orders of magnitude difference in folding rates. In the 1980’s, a useful idea emerged of “folding funnels”, but it wasn’t specific or quantitative. I will describe our current view of the folding mechanism. I will also describe the folding of the proteome in the cell, and how cellular aging may result from oxidative damage to proteins. Finally, I will describe a new method, based on folding funnels, for speeding up molecular dynamics simulations of proteins by several orders of magnitude.