PhD Project: Protein origami: New computational methods to predict protein folding

Supervisors: Scott Habershon, Gabriele Sosso

How does a protein fold into its native state? This is one of the most important and challenging problems in the chemical sciences, and a key question in understanding diseases driven by protein misfolding and aggregation (such as Parkinson’s disease). In this project, we will develop and employ a new computational scheme to access long time-scale protein folding events by mapping onto a discretized connectivity-based description of protein structure. This new approach will then enable us to investigate sequence-specific folding effects and translational folding, as well as providing a new scheme for protein-structure prediction.