Mathematics Colloquia and Seminars

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Description

The molecular basis of life rests on the activity of biological macro-molecules, mostly nucleic acids and proteins. A perhaps surprising finding that crystallized over the last handful of decades is that geometric reasoning plays a major role in our attempt to understand these activities. In this talk, I will address this connection between biology and geometry. I will present geometric models for computing the energy of a macromolecule, and describe analytical methods that compute the needed geometric measures of proteins, such as surface area and volume. Finally, I will describe one-dimensional representations of native protein structures, and their potential applications in modeling and prediction.