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. 

Congratulations to Zefeng on successfully passing his qualifying exam! Zefeng has demonstrated remarkable independence in his research and achieved an excellent grade in the examination. He is now set to advance to the next stage of pursuing his Ph.D. within the 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/

One of our collaboraive projects has been published in PNAS online. In this paper, we collaborated with Prof. Long LI's lab and performed MD simulations on the structures of SecA-SecY to reveal its peptide/protein translocation mechanism. Although only part of our simulation results was incorporated in the paper, the collaboration has inspired us to develop a new simulation method... Congratulations to Song, and thanks to all the collaborators!

The "Quantitative Biology Symposium 2022" was successfully held by the Center for Quantitative Biology (CQB) at Peking University on 3-4 Dec. The symposium is one of the series activities to celebrate the 20^th anniversary of CQB, which was founded in 2001 to develop pioneering interdisciplinary and quantitative biological studies in China. We are proud to be part of CQB for the past six years!