Conveners
CC. Biophysics and Medical Physics
- Kenneth Wong (Virginia Tech)
Charles Baker
(Virginia Tech)
10/20/11, 10:45 AM
Contributed (undergraduate)
New research indicates that post-transcriptional regulators, such as small RNAs (sRNAs), are key components of global regulatory networks. In particular, it has been discovered that these networks often comprise multiple sRNAs which control expression of a critical master regulator protein. However, the regulation of a single protein by multiple sRNAs is not currently well understood and the...
Hodjat Pendar
(Virginia Tech)
10/20/11, 10:57 AM
Contributed
The intrinsic stochasticity of gene expression can give rise to phenotypic heterogeneity in a population of genetically identical cells. Correspondingly, there is considerable interest in understanding how different molecular mechanisms impact the 'noise' in gene expression. Of particular interest are post-transcriptional regulatory mechanisms involving genes called small RNAs, which control...
Thierry Platini
(Virginia Tech)
10/20/11, 11:09 AM
Contributed
Regulatory genes called small RNAs (sRNAs) are known to play critical roles in cellular responses to changing environments. For several bacterial sRNAs, regulation is effected by coupled stoichiometric degradation with messenger RNAs (mRNAs). The nonlinearity inherent in this regulatory scheme implies that exact analytical solutions for the corresponding stochastic models are intractable....
Kenneth Shiao
10/20/11, 11:21 AM
Contributed
Proteins are a key element of life because they are involved in every metabolic process, yet a majority of proteins remain unannotated. Current chemical and physical annotation methods are inaccurate, inefficient, or expensive. Without proper annotation, understanding of organisms' metabolic pathways is limited. Based on the hypothesis that proteins with similar primary structures have similar...
Charles David
(University of North Carolina at Charlotte)
10/20/11, 11:33 AM
Contributed
A comparative study is made using three computational models that characterize native state dynamics starting from known protein structures taken from four distinct SCOP classifications. A geometrical simulation is performed, and the results are compared to the elastic network model and molecular dynamics. The essential dynamics is quantified by a direct analysis of a mode subspace constructed...
Pranav Maddi
(North Carolina School of Science and Mathematics)
10/20/11, 11:45 AM
Contributed (undergraduate)
Fibrin is the main structural protein involved in blood clotting, and exhibits high strength and elasticity. Fibrin study traditionally focuses on fully formed clots, whereas we employ new AFM nanoManipulation techniques to study single fibrin fiber mechanics. We used 4 and 10 residue peptides to interfere with the knob-hole and alpha-C interactions involved in fibrin polymerization to...
Yasser Aboelkassem
(Virginia Tech)
10/20/11, 11:57 AM
Contributed
Biomimetics is an increasingly important field in applied science that seeks to imitate systems and processes in nature to design improved engineering devices. In this study, we are inspired by insect respiratory systems, and model, analytically and numerically, the air transport within a single model insect tracheal tube. The tube wall undergoes localized, non- propagative rhythmic...
Mr
Eun-Jik Park
(Virginia Tech)
10/20/11, 12:09 PM
Contributed
Ciliary organisms like Paramecium Multimicronucleatum locomote by synchronized beating of cilia that produce metachronal waves over their body. In their natural environments they navigate through a variety of environments especially surfaces with different topology. We study the effects of wavy surfaces patterned on the PDMS channels on the locomotive abilities of Paramecium by characterizing...
