Tag 1 | Beckstein Lab

Undergraduate student Taylor Colburn was awarded the 2017 Tsong Prize for Undergraduate Research in the Department of Physics at Arizona State University for his work on Simulating the conformational transitions of the transmembrane symporter Mhp1.

Transition pathways in high dimensional spaces, such as the ones produced by advanced algorithms to sample large conformational changes in macromolecules, are difficult to analyze quantitatively. We introduce a method named Path Similarity Analysis (PSA) that enables us to quantify the similarity between two arbitrary paths and extract the atomic-scale determinants responsible for their differences. PSA is implemented in the MDAnalysis library.

Sean Seyler was awarded a 2016 Education Committee Travel Award to present his research on Path Similarity Analysis at the 60th Annual Meeting of the Biophysical Society in Los Angeles, CA.

Sean was a Ph.D. student in physics working on computational methods for sampling and quantifying macromolecular conformational transitions. He graduated in 2017.