Société Française de Bioinformatique

Mots-Clés

computational biophysics soft matter protein-membrane interaction tensegrity

Description

The PhD project intends to develop a soft-matter model describing the interaction between proteins and membranes. Most widely used coarse-grained models, like Martini, take a bottom-up point of view in which the full-atom description of amino-acid residues is replaced by a description with a smaller number of beads. Each of these beads is determined by merging a few atoms. We propose to explore a top-down point of view in which we aim at handling the proteins as soft objects whose shape is close to the shape of the molecular surface of the considered protein. The surface shape will be maintained using a tensegrity scheme that has already been tested on simple secondary structure elements. The modeling of the interactions of such soft objects with the membrane will permit to explore large structural transitions thanks to the smaller number of degrees of freedom.