Invited by the the Ministry of Education, Prof. Chen Song and collaborators designed a showcase class for the future AI-assisted education at the Global MOOC and Online Education Conference 2024, held in London on December 12th, 2024. Prof. Chen Song and Prof. Sai Li co-developed this class of computational biology, an interdisciplinary field deeply influenced by AI. Zefeng Zhu and Ruihan Dong from Song Group participated in the development as well as the live demonstration of the class in London.

Jingze Duan's first paper focusing on NOMPC has been published online in eLife (Link). NOMPC, a mechanosensitive ion channel from the TRP family, converts mechanical stimuli into ionic signals to excite neurons. Using all-atom molecular dynamics simulations, we identified that torque on the TRP domain toward the extracellular side directly drives channel opening, with compression and twisting of the AR domain coupling to facilitate this process. These findings support a twist-to-open gating model mediated by the AR domain's compression-twist coupling. Congratulations!

Chang Liu's inaugural paper on Ca²⁺-membrane interactions has been published in Phys. Chem. Chem. Phys. (Link). This research, conducted in collaboration with Prof. Rui Ma's laboratory, offers novel insights into the mechanisms underlying various biological phenomena associated with Ca²⁺-membrane interactions. The findings may pave the way for innovative approaches to manipulate the membrane curvature of vesicles in chemical, biological, and nanotechnological applications. Congratulations!

Prof. Chen Song was honored with an invitation to deliver a talk at the 2024 Frontier Symposium in Computational Chemistry, Biophysics, and Biological Sciences, which was held at the University of Seoul, Korea, from November 8th to November 10th, 2024. He presented our group's research titled "CTGoMartini: Simulating Protein Conformational Transitions with Gō-Martini Models." This symposium provides a fantastic opportunity for knowledge sharing in the field. Additionally, Lingfeng, a member of our group, also attended the conference.

Prof. Chen Song was invited to give a talk at the CCBSB 2024 conference in Haikou, China. He discussed our innovative model, ProtRAP-LM, and its applications in membrane protein screening within proteomes. 

Two graduate students, Huayang Sun and Ruichen Xu, from the Center for Quantitative Biology (CQB) and Center for Life Sciences (CLS), joined our group for a rotation training. Welcome!

Chang has completed her doctoral studies and she will pursue postdoctoral work at Lehigh University. Zigang has finished his undergraduate degree and he decides to continue his education at Lehigh University by pursuing a doctorate. Wishing them both much success and fulfillment in their future endeavors!

We are thrilled to welcome Tadsanee Awang to our group! After completing her first postdoctoral work, she will continue as a postdoctoral researcher with us. In her new role, Tadsanee will continue to focus on molecular dynamics simulations of antimicrobial peptides, and we look forward to the contributions she will make. Welcome, Tadsanee!

Jiaxuan and Song have completed their doctoral training and left the group for their new positions. They have done excellent work in their doctoral studies on the prediction of the alternative conformations of proteins and Switching Go-Martini simulations, respectively. We wish them all the best in their future career endeavors.

The Quantitative Biology 2024: Biomedical Data and AI conference was held in Chengdu, China, from July 15 to 18, 2024. Some members of our group, including Prof. Chen SONG, Kai, Zefeng, and Ruihan attended the conference. A special highlight was Zefeng's presentation of his novel model, FoldPolicy, along with his talk titled "Probabilistic matching and decoding of protein conformations".