Chemistry Colloquium: Suman Chakrabarty

The Department of Chemistry in the College of Arts and Sciences is pleased to welcome Suman Chakrabarty, an associate professor at S.N. Bose National Centre for Basic Sciences in Kolkata.

Title: Role of Metastable Conformational States in Proteins: From Function to Drug Discovery

Abstract: Structural biology of proteins is dominated by a native structure-centric view. However, biomolecular functions are intimately connected to protein motion/dynamics and often low-lying metastable or “excited” conformational states play an important role. For example, recent examples of “dynamic allostery” have established that a static structural view is not enough. In this talk, we shall discuss several such examples based on large scale classical molecular dynamics (MD) simulations. We shall demonstrate how the conformational plasticity and dynamics can be crucial to the function. Finally, we shall discuss our new ideas on identifying allosteric hotspots on protein surface to modulate therapeutically important protein-protein interactions (PPI) as a promising alternative strategy in computer aided discovery of allosteric inhibitors.