March 2002 Research Report

I attended a Biophysics workshop organized by and held for Theoretical Physics students at the University of Heidelberg. The week-long workshop (March 4-8) was held in Oberflockenbach at a University seminar house in German.

This was the program:

Mo morgen : H. Grubmueller (MPI Goettingen) Biophysik Einfuehrung

http://www.mpibpc.gwdg.de/abteilungen/071/hgrub/

nachmittag : H. Horner (Uni Heidelberg) Neuronale Netze

http://www.tphys.uni-heidelberg.de/~horner/

Di morgen : H. Grubmueller (MPI Goettingen) Biophysik Einfuehrung

nachmittag : M. Laessig (MPI Potsdam) Evolution Biologischer Systeme

http://www.thp.uni-koeln.de/~lassig/

Mi morgen : A. Mielke (Uni Heidelberg) Motormolekuele

http://www.tphys.uni-heidelberg.de/~mielke/

nachmittag : V. Sundararajan (DKFZ Heidelberg) Protein-Structure

http://www.dkfz-heidelberg.de/ibios

Do morgen : R. Wade (EMBL Heidelberg) Protein-Dynamik

http://www-z.embl-heidelberg.de:8080/ExternalInfo/wade/

nachmittag : L. van Hemmen (TU Muenchen) Neuronale Karten

http://www.physik.tu-muenchen.de/lehrstuehle/T35/

Fr morgen : B. Sulzer (Lion Bioscience Heidelberg) Datenanalyse (instead L. Ehrlich spoke)

http://www.lionbioscience.com/

nachmittag : Abreise

Friday afternoon, March 8, I attended Klemens Wild's talk about his crystal structure of the human SRP entitled The core of the human signal recognition particle:

crystal structure of an early protein-RNA assembly complex. He gave a concise overview of SRP's in general and specifics on the human SRP system.

I was in Berlin the week of March 10-16 for the annual Fulbright conference. We were able to meet with other Fulbrighters and discuss our research and courses, aspects of living in Europe, and our travels. In addition we met dignitaries including German Federal President Johannes Rau, the German Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer, U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for Educational and Cultural Affairs Patricia de Stacy Harrison, the U.S. Ambassador to Germany Daniel Coates, the German Fulbright Executive Driector Georg Schuette, the Mayor of Berlin Klaus Wowereit, Ms. Harriet Mayor Fulbright, and Chair of the J. William Fulbright Foreign Scholarship Board Caroline Yang.

In regard to SRP research, I fixed the qtable.dat I am using for SDA and UHBD calculations. The new one has parameters for the N-terminal H1, H2, and H3 and the C-terminal OXT designations as well as an NTRM (neutralized) and CTRM residue without a side chain. The side chain parameters still come from the appropriate amino acid. The old one did not assign proper charges to the N and C terminal ends of the protein. It is called qcharmm19.dat. Pka calculations are okay but should be redone since the first and last residues were not titrated in the old version. UHBD calculations will all have to be recalculated with the new parameters.

Coming up next month: Poster presentation at the Huenfeld Meeting (April 12-13)