New Approaches in Protein Structure Modeling Applications

                              Professor Yaohang Li
                         Department of Compute Science
                    North Carolina A&T State University

February 19, 2010 (Friday)
10:00AM  Donuts; 10:15 -11:30 AM Talk
First floor auditorium, EC&S Building

Accurately modeling protein or protein complex structure is considered
one of the most significant grand challenges that have broad economic and
scientific impact. Since Anfinsen's thermodynamic hypothesis is formulated,
according to which the native structure conformation has the minimum free
energy of all accessible conformations, the ab initio protein structure
modeling efforts are focused on globally optimizing a scoring (energy)
function to find the native conformation. However, due to insensitivity and
inaccuracy of the existing scoring functions
used to describe protein conformational energy, ab initio approaches have
low success rate in predicting models with satisfactory resolutions. In this
talk, we present new computational approaches of integrating multiple physics-
and knowledge-based scoring functions to
improve protein structure modeling accuracy. Applications in protein loop
structure modeling are also discussed.

Bio:
Yaohang Li is an Associate Professor in the Department of Computer Science
at North Carolina A&T State University. His research interests are in
Computational Biology, Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods and High
Performance Computing.
Yaohang Li received "Rookie of the Year" young investigator award at North
Carolina A&T State University in 2005 and Ralph E. Powe young faculty award
in Computer Science and Mathematics from Oak Ridge Associated Universities
(ORAU) in 2005. He is the recipient of a
National Science Foundation CAREER Award in 2009.
He received the Ph.D. and M.S. degrees in Computer Science from the Florida
State University in 2003 and 2000, respectively, and the B.S. degree in
Computer Science and Engineering from the South China University of Technology
in 1997.