Chemical and Biological Physics Guest Seminar
Date:
Lecture / Seminar
Time: 12:00
Title: Physics of the Nuclear Pore Complex: from phase separation to viral infections
Location: Perlman Chemical Sciences Building
Lecturer: Prof. Anton Zilman
Organizer: Department of Chemical and Biological Physics
Details: University of Toronto
Abstract: Nuclear Pore Complex (NPC) is a biomolecular “nanomachine” that controls nuc ... Read more Nuclear Pore Complex (NPC) is a biomolecular “nanomachine” that controls nucleocytoplasmic transport in eukaryotic cells. The key component of the functional architecture of the NPC is the assembly of the polymer-like intrinsically disordered proteins that line its passageway and play a central role in the NPC transport mechanism. Due to paucity of experimental methods capable to directly probe the morphology and the dynamics of this assembly in intact NPCs, much of our knowledge about its properties derives from /in vitro/ experiments interpreted through theoretical and computational modeling.
Remarkably, despite their molecular complexity, much of the behavior of these assemblies and their selective permeability with respect to cargo-carrying transport proteins can be understood based on minimal complexity models relying on the statistical physics of molecular assemblies on the nanoscale. I will present the recent insights into the architecture and the dynamics of the NPC arising from the theoretical analysis of the wide range of experimental results.
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