The Physics department colloquia are usually on Friday afternoons at 3 pm in Room 135. Coffee and cookies are served at 2:45 pm in the same room. Anyone is welcome.

Mechanics and Dynamics of Protein Structures
Dr. Zhong Ren, CEO-Renz Research

My research integrates experimental and computational approaches in dynamic crystallography to study mechanics and dynamics during protein function. I will present an example to illustrate how a K⁺ channels gating ring achieves its function for clean opening and closing. I will also present a recent study on the cooperative mechanism of human hemoglobin (doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0077141 and ~363) and demonstrate how a structural meta-analysis is employed to extract structural dynamics from increasingly abundant entries in the Protein Data Bank. I will show several experimental and computational advances that would suit different types of protein crystals in dynamic studies, which include light sensitive systems such as photoreceptors and light inert enzymes. Finally, I will propose a viable technical route to push time resolution of single crystal diffraction down to sub-ps using XFEL sources and speculate on what kind of structural signal that could be captured. The structural changes we have recently observed in a simpler hemoglobin from an invertebrate at 100 ps and a fraction of such synchrotron bunch provide confidence for future XFEL experiments.