Informal Statistical Physics Seminar

Date
Tue, Feb 27, 2018 1:15 pm - 2:15 pm
Location
IPST 1116 Conference Room

Description

Speaker: Professor Ronald Levy, Temple University


Title: Exploring Fitness and Free Energy Landscapes of Proteins, Part l: Statistical Models of Sequence Co-Variation


Abstract: The first talk in this two part series will review recent work in my lab concerning the construction and analysis of fitness and free energy landscapes of proteins, focusing mostly on sequence based approaches. I will describe the Potts Hamiltonian statistical model of sequence co-variation, and how we are using it to study the acquisition of drug resistance in HIV proteins, and epistasis. The likelihood of a mutation at one position in a genome depends on the pattern of mutations at all the other positions. This phenomenon is called epistasis, and it is responsible for the "entrenchment" of drug resistance mutations when a sufficient number of background mutations accumulate in the genome. I will also talk about our efforts to map the conformational free energy landscape of kinase family proteins, using the Potts model to infer sequence probabilities and their structural propensities, and to connect this information to conformational free energy simulations in structure space.