Ms. Huijiao REN has joined our group as an administrative assistant. Warmest Welcome!

Based on Lei CHEN Lab’s cryo-EM structure of OSCA, we explored the possible ion permeation pathway of this mechanosensitive ion channel and simulated its conformational changes in response to membrane surface tension. The results match with mutagenesis and electrophysiology studies, and a mechano-gating mechanism was proposed. It’s been a very smooth and successful collaboration between three labs: Lei CHEN’s lab@PKU, Zhiqiang YAN’s lab@Fudan, and us.

Dali Wang performed the computational work. The paper has appeared online: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41594-018-0117-6

Prof. Ulrich Zachariae from the University of Dundee visited us 26 Aug – 2 Sep. He gave us a brilliant seminar, and had lots of interesting discussions with faculties and students at CQB.

Hiking at the Fragrant Hills Park. Should do this more often.

Dr. Chen Song was invited to attend the 16th Chinese Biophysics Congress and give a talk at Chengdu on 25 Aug.

http://www.bsc.org.cn/2018/

We won two research grants from the National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC): one to Dr. Chen Song and one to Dr. Yanyan Liu. Thanks to all the group members who have been involved in the research and grant application.

Dr. Chen SONG was invited to give a talk for the Fifth National Conference on Biological Physical Chemistry at Taiyuan on 25 July 2018.

http://ncbpc-5.csp.escience.cn/dct/page/1

We are pleased to have two new members, Lei WANG and Yang WANG, joining our group very recently. Lei finished his three rotations at CQB and decided to join us to pursue a PhD. Yang just graduated from “Beijing Computational Science Research Center” and joined us as a research assistant (and probably will become a postdoc soon). Welcome!

Invited by Dr. Chen Song, Prof. Jianpeng Ma from Rice University and Baylor College of Medicine visited us and gave a very inspiring seminar entitled “Application of Parallel Continuous Simulated Tempering (PCST) to Cryo-EM structural refinement at near-atomic resolution” at CQB on 22 June. Jiangguo Zhang is the host student and will do his PhD with Prof. Jianpeng Ma at Rice.

We attended “The 2nd Worldwide Chinese Computational Biology and Molecular Simulation Conference” at Sun Yat-Sen University, Guangzhou. It’s such a great conference organized by the School of Pharmaceutical Sciences, Sun Yat-Sen University. And we will organize the 3rd WCCB Conference in 2020!