Chen and Song were invited to visit Dr. Yuji Sugita's Theoretical Molecular Science Laboratory at RIKEN (Wako, Japan) on 13-16 Sep, 2023. During the visit, Chen shared our team's recent advancements in predicting alternative protein conformations, while Song presented his research on Switching Go-Martini simulations. Interestinly, Professor Ben Corry from the Australian National University happened to be in Tokyo at the same time and also participated in the seminars!
After dedicating eight years to studying and contributing to our group, Dali has embarked on a new professional adventure. Dali has accepted a position as a faculty member at Binzhou Medical University, Yantai Campus.
Dali's journey with our group began in 2015 when he joined as our first graduate student. Over the years, he excelled, earning his Ph.D. in 2020 and subsequently dedicating three years to postdoctoral research within our team. Dali consistently proved himself to be an invaluable asset, not only a diligent member but also a dependable and helpful friend to all.
As Dali moves forward in his career, we extend our warmest wishes for his success and happiness in all his future endeavors!
Jiaxuan and Chang attended the EBSA Congress in Stockholm, Sweden, on July 31-August 4, 2023. Jiaxuan presented her work on the prediction of the alternative conformations of proteins, and Chang presented her work on asymmetrical Ca2+-membrane interactions.
Welcome Zhongjie to join the group! Zhongjie has recently obtained his PhD from Beijing University of Technology, China. He is highly enthusiastic about studying protein allostery using multi-scale computational methods. Notably, he has been awarded the prestigious CLS fellowship and will be commencing his postdoctoral work with us from August onward.
The entire group enthusiastically participated in the first national meeting on biomolecular structure prediction and simulation, held in Hangzhou from June 16th to 18th. The event proved to be a remarkable gathering, showcasing cutting-edge advancements within the field. Moreover, it provided a delightful opportunity to reconnect with friends, colleagues, and former members of our group.
We are excited to announce the addition of two new members to our group: Haozhe Guo and Dr. Nanhao Chen. Haozhe, who graduated from Peking University, is a graduate student in the CLS program. Dr. Nanhao Chen, who has just completed his PhD at UC Davis, joins us as a postdoctoral researcher. With their backgrounds in chemistry, both Haozhe and Nanhao will be working on force field development for molecular dynamics simulations. We warmly welcome them to our group and look forward to fruitful collaborations.
We are glad to welcome Ruihan on board. Ruihan majored in biological sciences at Tianjin University. She is interested in deep learning-based antimicrobial drug design and will work on this exciting project for her PhD study.
The postponed CQB annual meeting (2022) was held on 18 Mar 2023. Jiaxuan presented her work on exploring the alternative conformations of proteins from deep learning predictions, and won the scholarship of quantitative biology. Congratulations!!
Dr. Song was invited to give two online talks lately: one at the forum on chemical biology (4 Mar), and the other at the forum on simulations of biomolecules (10 Mar). Sometimes, online meetings and seminars are indeed more convenient ...
Congratulations to Kai and Lei for the publication of the ProtRAP paper in JCIM (Link). In this paper, we further utilized the membrane contact probability (MCP) from the MemProtMD database and developed a deep learning based predictior that can tell which residues of a given protein sequence are lipid accessible, solvent (water) accessible, or buried in the protein interior. This tool may find wide applications in protein structure prediction and drug discovery, especially when membrane proteins are involved. For quick predictions, an online server has been setup: http://www.songlab.cn/ProtRAP/home/
