The main aim of our research is to elucidate the basic biophysical mechanisms of the functioning of the cell membrane using different molecular modeling techniques.
We are particularly interested in the following:
- organisation of the membrane/water interface and hydrocarbon chain region in the biological membranes, which are built of phospho- and glycolipids with saturated and mono-unsaturated chains
- influence of the selected sterols, terpenoids and local anaestethics on the membrane/water interface and the non-polar core of biological membranes
- antibacterial activity and selectivity of magainin-2 peptide
- signal transduction of vasopressin V2 receptor in the membrane
- lipid - peptide, lipid - protein interactions
- membrane active compounds
In addition to membranes studies, we also successfully applied molecular modelling to investigate the influence of spin labeling on the structure and dynamics of cytochrome c and to study the dimerisation and polymerisation of alpha1-antitrypsin, a serum protein.
In the field of bioinformatics, we employ:
- fold recognition methods and comparative modelling to predict the biological function of newly identified proteins,
- biological text mining to handle non-trivial text queries to NCBI PubMed database
Scientific cooperation:
- Professor Witold K. Subczyński, Department of Biophysics, Medical College of Wisconsin, Milwaukee, USA.
- Professor Wladek Minor, Department of Molecular Physiology and Biological Physics, University of Virginia, Ch'ville, USA.
- Professor Gerald Kneller, Centre de Biophysique Moléculaire, CNRS, Orléans, France.