David Baker is Robert Ross lecturer on Monday 4/27 1:30-3

[Ralf Bundschuh]

Dear colleagues,

This Monday (4/27) 1:30-3:00 the Interdisciplinary Biophysics Graduate 
Program is holding its annual Robert Ross Lecture.  This event is the 
highlight of our academic year and always features a very high profile 
speaker.  You and the entire OSU community are invited.

This year's Robert Ross lecturer is David Baker from the University of 
Washington.  He is a National Academy of Sciences member and a Howard 
Hughes Medical Institute investigator.  He is one of the leaders in the 
field of computational protein structure prediction and he is especially 
famous  for using crowdsourcing in this pursuit through his screen saver 
project Rosetta at Home and his online video game Foldit that has players 
solve protein folding problems using their human intelligence.  His full 
title and abstract are:

Post-Evolutionary Biology: Design of novel protein structures, functions 
and assemblies
David Baker, University of Washington
Monday, 4/27, 1:30-3, 170 Davis Heart and Lung Institute

Proteins mediate the critical processes of life and beautifully solve 
the challenges faced during the evolution of modern organisms. Our goal 
  is to design a new generation of proteins that address current day 
problems not faced during evolution. In contrast to traditional protein 
  engineering efforts, which have focused on modifying naturally 
occurring  proteins, we design new proteins from scratch based on 
Anfinsen’s  principle that proteins fold to their global free energy 
minimum. We compute amino acid sequences predicted to fold into proteins 
with new  structures and functions, produce synthetic genes encoding 
these sequences, and characterize them experimentally. I will describe 
the design of ultra-stable idealized proteins, flu neutralizing 
proteins,  high affinity ligand binding proteins, and self-assembling 
protein nanomaterials. I will also describe the contributions of the 
general public to these efforts through the distributed computing 
project Rosetta at Home and the online protein folding and design game Foldit.

I hope to see you, your lab, and your colleagues at the lecture on Monday.

     Yours
           Ralf