NSF Award
1516959
Title: Research Coordination Network: Protein Folding and Dynamics<br/><br/>The objective of this Research Coordination Network: Protein Folding Consortium (RCN:PFC) is to provide a novel platform for establishing and nurturing collaborations and training between experimentalists, theorists and computational biologists who are focused on obtaining a molecular-level understanding of the folding and other dynamical processes of proteins. Proteins are ubiquitous in nature, executing biological functions as diverse as populating the immune system with defense agents against viral infections, digesting food, serving as materials to create skin, muscle and hair, converting signals from the environment into cellular responses and replicating DNA. The RCN:PFC will probe the molecular mechanisms by which proteins adopt their unique shapes and the dynamic processes by which those shapes enable their plethora of functions that maintain life. These phenomena are sufficiently complex that a consortium of experts in both experimental and computational methods is required to understand their properties. The consortium also aims to provide a novel and interactive training and mentoring platform for younger scientists in the field. To achieve these objectives, the PFC will support two annual meetings, one with the principal investigators and another with the investigators and their students, and a website. In many ways, the consortium acts as a virtual institute focused on a studying one of the most important and fascinating problems in biology. It is anticipated that accelerated progress towards a deeper understanding of the fundamental principles that govern protein folding reactions and protein dynamics will have a major impact on biochemistry, medicine and the biotechnology industry.<br/><br/>The goal of this Protein Folding Consortium (PFC) is to transform the way that scientists think about the protein folding problem and protein dynamics by creating a consortium of experimentalists, theorists and computational biologists whose collective efforts exceed the progress attainable by individual labs. Advances in high performance computing combined with novel sampling methods and the application of sophisticated experiments now make it possible for simulations and experiments to study protein folding and dynamics on similar time scales. Simulations generate testable predictions for experiments. Results from experiments can be used to refine simulation methodologies and force fields. This iterative synergistic approach between simulation and experiment, when deployed across proteins of different folds, sizes, complexity and evolutionary profiles, will allow for a coherent and convergent description of the folding process. The expanding ambitions of the PFC encompass folding in vivo, the evolution of biophysical properties, the coupled folding and binding of intrinsically disordered proteins, macromolecular machines and functional dynamics. These new ventures are related, in one way or another, to the folding free energy surface of a protein and its modulation by sequence, history and the environment. This project is jointly funded by the Molecular Biophysics Cluster in the Division of Molecular and Cellular Biosciences in the Directorate for Biological Sciences; the Physics of Living Systems Program in the Division of Physics, and the Chemistry of Life Processes Program in the Division of Chemistry in the Directorate of Mathematical and Physical Sciences.
