The discipline of Biocomputation and Bioinformatics has arisen from the need to manage and mine massive amounts of biological data being generated daily. New computing tools are required to analyze complex data and make predictions to guide experimental work and offer powerful new methods to predict molecular structure and understand the complex behavior of living organisms.
The Biocomputation and Bioinformatics Constellation interests are the study of protein function and stability from physico-chemical principles. To accomplish this we combine the use of computational and experimental techniques. Current projects of interest described here are:
- Computational Design of thermostable proteins – These studies are important in health and biotechnology related applications
- Translocation of peptides across lipid bilayers – These studies are important for drug delivery and antimicrobial design
- Allosteric changes in cell signaling complexes - 50% of known drugs act on GPCR, a signaling family of proteins