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Eugene I. Shakhnovich
Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology
Harvard University
12 Oxford Street
Cambridge, MA 02138
Tel: (617) 495-4130
Fax: (617) 384-9228: eugene@belok.harvard.edu
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The Shakhnovich Biophysics Lab works on a broad range of topics ranging
from Molecular Evolution and Origins of Life to Topics in Drug
Discovery. The unifying theme of our approach is bottom up where
microscopic coarse-grained or atomic resolution models based on
statistical mechanics are developed in order to gain fundamental
understanding of processes in living matter. This lab made fundamental
contributions to studies of Protein Folding using broad spectrum of
approaches from analytical statistical mechanical theory of random end
evolutionary selected heteropolymers to lattice model simulations and
more recently to all-atom simulations of folding processes. We
discovered the criteria for polypeptide sequences to be protein-like
(''energy-gap theory'') and in kinetics we discovered nucleation
mechanism and folding nucleus - a theoretical discovery was subsequently
fully confirmed in experiments. Our more recent efforts in protein
folding concerned atomic resolution studies of folding pathways and
development of models and energy functions that are capable to fold
proteins from sequence to high resolution structures. We first developed
(using lattice models) stochastic protein design that was used later by
other groups to design new proteins. Our approach to Molecular Design
resulted in new algorithm, SMoG that is being used in various practical
applications. Our other important interests concern mathematical
population genetics, various aspects of bioinformatics and material science.
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