Objective
Complexity and self-organisation are critical yet poorly understood phenomena. This project aims to develop and apply mathematical and computational approaches that will identify principles governing the emergent organisation of self-organising biomolecu lar systems. Computational methods for characterising the dynamics of these intrinsically complex processes will be developed and applied to protein folding and molecular self-assembly. The methodologies will focus on the complexity of the system's dyna mics thus advancing fundamental knowledge concerning the role of complexity in biological systems. A composite approach will be pursued, focusing on critical aspects of the problems defining the route from sequence (chemical formula) to complex functiona lity of native structures. This involves determination of the underlying potential energy surfaces, their topological, statistical and dynamic properties for polypeptides and RNA self-organization; finding the features of the energy funnel for protein in water in order to distinguish between "good" and "bad" folders; characterising the dynamics in terms of information flows between different time- and length-scales; reconstructing dynamic hierarchies in model biopolymer systems thus directly detecting the emergence of the dynamic forms and information flow on different spatiotemporal scales; and calculating the statistical complexity of model systems and the key parts of realistic biomolecules. The data for these investigations will be obtained from sophisticated all- atom simulations of realistic biomolecular systems and experimental mechanical stretching of giant single molecular proteins. The improved understanding that will be obtained of the dynamical complexity of native and folding biomolecu lar systems should provide a basis for the accurate calculation of biomolecular folding and function and will therefore be of fundamental relevance to biology, medicine and biotechnology.
Fields of science (EuroSciVoc)
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques.
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques.
- natural sciencescomputer and information sciencescomputational science
- natural sciencesbiological sciencesbiochemistrybiomoleculesproteinsprotein folding
- natural sciencesbiological sciencesgeneticsRNA
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Topic(s)
Call for proposal
FP6-2003-NEST-PATH
See other projects for this call
Funding Scheme
STREP - Specific Targeted Research ProjectCoordinator
CAMBRIDGE
United Kingdom