Forum 01/30/2003

“Exploring global distortions of biological macromolecules”

Florence Tama – Molecular Biology Department, The Scripps Research Institute, La Jolla, CA

Normal mode analysis is a powerful technique to investigate dynamics of biological systems. Recent developments, such as elastic normal mode theory, in this field now allow calculations on very large assemblies such as viruses, ribosome .. We will show how normal mode can be use to predict conformational change of biological systems from their X-ray structures or from cryo-EM data and  also how normal mode analysis can be use for the fitting of X-ray structures into cryo-EM map.