Mitochondrial heat-shock protein hsp60 is essential for assembly of proteins imported into yeast mitochondria

A nuclear encoded mitochondrial heat-shock protein hsp60 is required for the assembly into oligomeric complexes of proteins imported into the mitochondrial matrix. hsp60 is a member of the 'chaperonin' class of protein factors, which include the Escherichia coli groEL protein and the Rubisco subunit-binding protein of chloroplast

Expression of Hsp70 in the red swamp crayfish, <em>Procambarus clarkii</em> in response to immune challenge

A heat shock protein 70 (Hsp70) was identified from *Procambarus clarkii* (named as PcHsp70). The open reading frame of the PcHsp70 cDNA was 1917 bp, encoding a 638 aa protein with signature sequences of the Hsp70 family. Tissue distribution results showed that PcHsp70 has relatively high expression in immune-related tissues such as hepatopancreas, gill, and hemocytes. The expressions of PcHsp70 in hepatopancreas and gill were significantly induced by Gram-positive bacterium, Gram-negative bacterium, and white spot syndrome virus stimulation, indicating that PcHsp70 may be involved in the immune response to pathogen invasion. The research will provide a foundation for understanding the resistance and stress mechanism of Hsp70 in *P. clarkii*

Development of High Performance Molecular Dynamics with Application to Multimillion-Atom Biomass Simulations

An understanding of the recalcitrance of plant biomass is important for efficient economic production of biofuel. Lignins are hydrophobic, branched polymers and form a residual barrier to effective hydrolysis of lignocellulosic biomass. Understanding lignin\u27s structure, dynamics and its interaction and binding to cellulose will help with finding more efficient ways to reduce its contribution to the recalcitrance. Molecular dynamics (MD) using the GROMACS software is employed to study these properties in atomic detail. Studying complex, realistic models of pretreated plant cell walls, requires simulations significantly larger than was possible before. The most challenging part of such large simulations is the computation of the electrostatic interaction. As a solution, the reaction-field (RF) method has been shown to give accurate results for lignocellulose systems, as well as good computational efficiency on leadership class supercomputers. The particle-mesh Ewald method has been improved by implementing 2D decomposition and thread level parallelization for molecules not accurately modeled by RF. Other scaling limiting computational components, such as the load balancing and memory requirements, were identified and addressed to allow such large scale simulations for the first time. This work was done with the help of modern software engineering principles, including code-review, continuous integration, and integrated development environments. These methods were adapted to the special requirements for scientific codes. Multiple simulations of lignocellulose were performed. The simulation presented primarily, explains the temperature-dependent structure and dynamics of individual softwood lignin polymers in aqueous solution. With decreasing temperature, the lignins are found to transition from mobile, extended to glassy, compact states. The low-temperature collapse is thermodynamically driven by the increase of the translational entropy and density fluctuations of water molecules removed from the hydration shell

Computational and theoretical aspects of biomolecular structure and dynamics

This is the final report for a project that sought to evaluate and develop theoretical, and computational bases for designing, performing, and analyzing experimental studies in structural biology. Simulations of large biomolecular systems in solution, hydrophobic interactions, and quantum chemical calculations for large systems have been performed. We have developed a code that implements the Fast Multipole Algorithm (FMA) that scales linearly in the number of particles simulated in a large system. New methods have been developed for the analysis of multidimensional NMR data in order to obtain high resolution atomic structures. These methods have been applied to the study of DNA sequences in the human centromere, sequences linked to genetic diseases, and the dynamics and structure of myoglobin

The future of molecular dynamics simulations in drug discovery

Molecular dynamics simulations can now track rapid processes—those occurring in less than about a millisecond—at atomic resolution for many biologically relevant systems. These simulations appear poised to exert a significant impact on how new drugs are found, perhaps even transforming the very process of drug discovery. We predict here future results we can expect from, and enhancements we need to make in, molecular dynamics simulations over the coming 25 years, and in so doing set out several Grand Challenges for the field. In the context of the problems now facing the pharmaceutical industry, we ask how we can best address drug discovery needs of the next quarter century using molecular dynamics simulations, and we suggest some possible approaches