Davit Potoyan (Iowa State University): Multi-scale computational studies of biomolecular dynamics, regulation, and phase separation

Title: Multi-scale computational studies of biomolecular dynamics, regulation, and phase separation

Speaker: Davit Potoyan, Iowa State University

Hosted by: Garegin Papoian

Abstract: 

Cellular life is contingent on the ability of biomolecules to self-organize by forming dynamic and functional compartments. Uncovering the underlying driving forces for biomolecular self-organization is a long-standing fundamental problem for biological sciences. Experiments of the last decade have found that liquid-liquid phase separation of biomolecules underlies the formation of a large number of mesoscopic cellular compartments. Ability to phase separation is encoded in sequence of biomolecules. However, in vivo biomolecules phase-separate in a heterogenous and out of equilibrium environments which further complicates the extraction of simple sequence-function relationships.  Disentangling the roles of sequence and environment on biomolecular phase separation is posing unique challenges for both theory and experiment which call for the development of novel interdisciplinary multi-scale computational approaches.

Our group is developing and applying multi-scale computational models that use atomistic, coarse-grained, and phase-field techniques to study nuclear compartmentalization at different scales, in and out of equilibrium. In the talk, we will present a selection of recent results on protein-RNA phase transitions, mesoscale nuclear dynamics of chromatin phase separation, and detailed models of biomolecular condensates based on bioinformatics and atomistic simulations.

BIO:

Davit received his Ph.D. in Chemical Physics at the University of Maryland-College Park in 2012. He spent the next few years as a postdoctoral scholar at the Center for Theoretical Biological Physics at Rice University in Houston TX. Davit joined Iowa State University in 2017 as an Assistant Professor of Chemistry. The research in Dr. Potoyan’s group is computational biophysics broadly defined. Current efforts are directed at problems related to the biomolecular condensation, thermal adaptation of enzymes, mesoscale organization of chromatin and modeling genetic regulatory networks.