Summer School on Simulation Approaches to Problems in Molecular and Cellular Biology

Workshops

When

2009/08/31 - 2009/09/05

Place

Miramar Palace, San Sebastian (Spain)

Organizers

Paolo Carloni, Michele Parrinello, Ursula Rothlisberger, Daniel Sanchez-Portal, Angel Rubio

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Directors

              Paolo Carloni.
              SISSA and INFM DEMOCRITOS. Triestre. Italy.
              Michele Parrinello.
              ETH Lugano. Switzerland. 
              Ursula Rothlisberger.
              EPFL. Lausanne. Switzerland.

Local organisers

             Daniel Sanchez-Portal.
             DIPC and Unidad de Física de los Materiales, Centro Mixto CSIC-UPV/EHU. Donostia.
             Angel Rubio.
             Nano Bio Spectroscopy group and ETSF,
             Universidad del País Vasco and Unidad de Física de Materiales,
             Centro Mixto CSIC-UPV/EHU. Donostia.

Description

Cellular functions - like growth, (programmed) cell death, metabolism etc - ultimately depend of interactions between macromolecules encoded by DNA. Proteins and RNA directly control the cell and regulate its functions through the reactions they perform, by allosteric changes driven by endogeneous and exogeneous factors and by their mutual interactions.

All of these processes involve molecular recognition, i.e. the process by which two or more biological molecules interact to form a specific complex. Molecular recognition is dominated by short-range, often transient, interactions at the contact surface of the interacting molecules. Even conformational changes and assembly of very large macromolecular aggregates, which can be propagated through long distances (tens of Angstroms), are the sum of local interactions between small molecules (like messengers) or macromolecules with their cellular targets.

Ultimately, therefore, even the understanding of the integration of biological complexes into cellular pathways (the so called 'systems biology') requires mechanistic understanding of the physical basis of molecular recognition. A quantitative description of cellular pathways in molecular terms is still mostly missing, although it would strongly impact on pharmaceutical sciences, as drugs target (and mutations affect) pathways, rather than single biomolecules. Such information is also crucial in nanobiotechnology, e.g. to design artificial sensing devices, which in Nature involve entire cascades of events and not only a single protein.

Molecular simulation constitute a key field to contribute to this issue. It can predict structure, dynamics, energetics, reactivity and spectroscopic properties of the cellular components (i.e. large macromolecular aggregates) involved in these pathways.

Tremendous challenges have to be taken before this ambitious goal can be reached. First, the systems are very complex and so are the interactions involved. In addition, ligand-protein processes involve small changes of free energies (less than 1 eV for non-covalent protein-protein interactions), and they are often entropy-driven. Next, the environment is very complex: cell membranes are far from being a simple lipid bilayer whilst the cytoplasm is far from being a simple aqueous solution. Finally, most often experimental structural information is partially or totally lacking.



Website

More information available in the School website

In collaboration with the Donostia International Physics Center (DIPC)

Special registration fees. For further information, please, visit the website: http://www.cecam.org/workshop-0-340.html