Center for Functional Nanomaterials Seminar

Biological organisms are masters in utilizing available energy resources such as sunlight, or food molecules of various types to drive their metabolism. For this purpose they have developed complex protein nano-machines that facilitate conversion of one form of energy into another. For example, the energy of photons absorbed by photosynthetic organisms is, with a help of energy-transducing proteins converted into high energy electrons, proton gradients, and energy stored in forms of chemical bonds of fuel or food molecules.

Biological nano-machines exhibit a fascinating complexity of architectures, and move over a range of timescales that can span many orders of magnitude. The nature of their interaction with the cellular environment is poorly understood. Computational modeling of the function of these proteins is extremely challenging and requires multi-scale approaches. I will describe my work on how we go about solving these challenges computationally, and on what we learned from nature about harnessing and utilizing energy.