Seminar
14/09/2018
Exploring the Energy Landscape for Protein Folding and Function: The Convergences of Structural Models and Sequence Coevolution Information.

Prof. José Onuchic

(Rice University, USA)

Energy landscape theory has been a powerful approach to study protein folding dynamics and function. The discovery that an accurate estimate of the joint probability distribution of amino acid occupancies in protein families provides insights about residue-residue coevolution and concrete details about protein folding landscapes has also advanced structural biophysics. Our realization that the collection of couplings and local fields as parameters of such distribution is inherently connected with the thermodynamics of sequence selection towards folding and function demonstrates the importance of coevolutionary methods to understand stability and function of biomolecules...