Dr Chen Song was invited to visit Martinac group at  Victor Chang Cardiac Research Institute , and gave a seminar entitled “Activation of the mechanosensitive ion channel OSCA” on 15 Feb, 2019.

Dr Chen Song was invited to visit Corry group at Australian National University, and gave a seminar entitled “To understand, predict and design membrane proteins” on 6 Feb, 2019.

Prof. Jie ZHENG from UC Davis visited our group on 13 Jan 2019, after the CQB annual meeting. We discussed and exchanged interesting thoughts on TRPV1 gating.

We presented four posters at the CQB annual meeting. And Dali won the CQB scholarship. Well done, everybody!

Dr. Chen Song was invited to give a talk at the “Workshop on the Methods of Protein Structure and Dynamics”, at Beijing Computational Science Research Center on 12-13 Dec, 2018. The whole group attended the session of computational methods.

Dr. Chen Song was invited to attend the 18^th KIAS Conference at Seoul, Korea,  15-17 Nov 2018.

Prof. Ran Friedman (Linnaeus University, Sweden) visited us and delivered a seminar entitled “Computer simulation in cancer research … and whisky” on 8 Nov 2018.

Invited by Dr. Chen SONG, Prof. Catherine C.L. WONG (Director of the Center for Precision Medicine Multiomics, PKUHSC) visited us and gave a wonderful talk entitled “Mass Spectrometry-based Omics Technologies in Life Science: Basic Research and Applications”.

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