BIOPHYSICAL SOCIETY NEWSLETTER
10
APRIL
2014
Subgroups
IDP
The 8
th
Annual IDP Subgroup Symposium in
San Francisco had the theme
Intrinsic Protein
Disorder: Structure and Mechanisms
and catered
to a large audience. The keynote lecture by
Jane
Clark
, University of Cambridge, focused on an
impressive array of structural and kinetic experi-
ments to inform on mechanisms of IDP interac-
tions via induced fit and conformational selection.
Clark also discussed several questions central to
understanding the principles of IDP interactions,
including the dependence of binding kinetics on
the level of residual structure, salt concentration,
and charge properties.
Robert Best
, of NIH, followed with a description
of his recent coarse-grained modeling study of
IDP binding to one or more specific targets.
An-
drea Soranno
, from
Ben Shculer’s
laboratory at the
University of Zurich, gave the first Molecular Ki-
netics Postdoctoral Research Award presentation,
which combined single molecule fluorescence
approaches and polymer theory to describe how
crowding affects the conformational ensembles
of IDPs. This was followed by Jean Baum, from
Rutgers University, who spoke about the modula-
tion of conformations and aggregation kinetics of
N-terminal acetylated alpha-synuclein by binding
of copper ions and beta-synuclein based on a set
of clever NMR experiments.
Michael Woodside
,
Unviersity of Alberta, Canada, ended this session
with a discussion of his intriguing visualization of
diverse transient structures in small oligomers of
alpha-synuclein detected by pulling experiments
with optical tweezers.
After a short break,
Richard Kriwacki
, from St.
Jude Children’s Research Hospital, discussed the
functional roles of dual cyclin binding motifs in
p21, regulation of p27 by tyrosine phosphoryla-
tion and his most recent efforts in developing
small molecule inhibitors of p27 for combating
hearing loss.
Martin Blackledge
, of the Institut
de Biologie Structurale, France, described his
computational approach to constructing structural
ensembles of IDPs to provide a picture of their
energy landscapes.
Tzachi Hagai
, from Madan
Babu’s laboratory at the Unviersity of Cambridge,
gave the second Molecular Kinetics Postdoctoral
Award presentation and discussed bioinformatics
analyses of host-mimicking linear motifs in the
regulation of viral proteins.
Mark Bowen
, Stony
Brook University, followed with a presentation
of how the NMDA receptor may be allosterically
modulated by compaction of its disordered intra-
cellular C-terminal domain.
The symposium concluded with an anchoring
keynote lecture by
Rohit Pappu
, Washington Uni-
versity, who described a framework that integrates
polymer theory and atomistic simulation to de-
code the sequence-ensemble relationships of IDPs.
In particular, Pappu discussed how charge charac-
teristics of IDPs govern the globule-coil transition
and how the theoretical framework can be used
to guide the tuning of the peptide sequence to
achieve ensembles with specific characteristics.
—
Jianhan Chen
and
Ben Schuler
,
Program Co-Chairs
BIV
Biophysics in the cell comes alive at the BIV
symposium
The fourth symposium of the Biopolymers
In
Vivo
(BIV) subgroup, held at the Biophysical
Society Meeting in San Francisco, was very suc-
cessful and featured many exciting lectures. The
mission of the BIV subgroup, founded four years
ago by
Margaret Cheung
and
Pernilla Wittung-
Stafshede
, is to promote the quantitative under-
standing of living systems from the molecular
to the whole organism level. BIV is interested
in how---and whybiomolecular processes differ be-
tween test tube and cell. This year’s BIV program
chairs,
Gilad Haran
and
Jeffrey Skolnick
, chose the
theme of molecular machines and how they func-
tion inside cells.
Keynote speaker
Judith Frydman
highlighted her
recent work onTRiC/CCT chaperones, while Julia
