Quite a few group members stayed in Beijing during the Chinese New Year holidays. We had a hot pot together in the Jiayuan cafeteria on the first day of the Niu Year. Happy New Year, everyone!

Dr. Chen SONG was invited to give a seminar at the PSI seminar series on Jan 20: https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/byAxfC4VTIQZCxI0j4QbIQ

The PSI seminars are organized by Profs. ZHENG Weimou, GONG Haipeng, and BU Dongbo, mainly focusing on computational studies of protein structures.

Congratulations to WANG Lei, who won the CQB scholarship (Grade 3) of the year, again!

Congratulations to Jiaxuan, who has passed the Ph.D. qualifying exam with an excellent grade!

Invited by Dr. SONG, Prof. XU Dong from the University of Missouri-Columbia gave us an online CQB seminar entitled “Graph Neural Networks to Learn Long-range Interactions in Proteins from Molecular Dynamics Simulations” on Jan 11, 2021. Around 140 attendees participated in the event, and it’s very interesting to see how graph neural networks can be used to identify the allosteric pathways from MD trajectories.

We invited Dr. YANG Jianyi from Nankai University to give us a seminar at CQB on Dec 21. Jianyi is an expert in protein structure prediction, who developed the well-known software trRosetta. He also contributed to the development of I-TASSER. The seminar was entitled “Protein and RNA structure prediction based on deep learning”, and attracted much attention both offline and online.

Dr. Chen SONG was invited to give a talk at the “International Symposium of Biophysics and Soft Matter Frontiers” at Shandong University, Jinan, on Dec 19. It was a combination of offline and online symposium, and researchers from four countries and regions presented their latest work.

It was our great pleasure to invite Prof. Gaetano T. Montelione to give us an online seminar entitled “Proteins Flex to Function: Roles of Conformational Plasticity in Protein Function”. Prof. Montelione is currently endowed chair in structural bioinformatics and professor of chemistry at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, well known as an expert and innovator in the fields of structural biology and protein NMR. The seminar reminded us that the dynamic nature of proteins should always be kept in mind in the structural and functional studies of proteins.

Congratulations to Dali, who has passed his PhD thesis defense on Nov 27. Dr. Dali WANG will continue to work with us as a postdoc, under the support of the CLS fellowship.

Dr. Chen SONG was invited to give a talk at the “Multiscale Modeling for Biotherapeutics Symposium” on Nov 19, an event organized by Schrödinger, Inc.