Ricky Sexton
Ricky graduated from ASU with a doctorate in physics in December of 2023. He did a research rotation project in Fall 2017, where he was working on a computational method for performing pKa calculations, namely our open source propkatraj method. He has since done work on small molecule parameterization for CFTR channel-blockers and the effects of external electric fields on EGFR. He has also investigated membrane properties in molecular dynamics (MD) simulations. His main work has been investigating GPCR-cholesterol interactions using coarse-grained MD and developed a Bayesian framework to analyze the MD data. He would like to better understand how the lipid environment effects protein signaling/transport and build models that can explain the behavior.
Publications
James Geiger, Rick Sexton, Zina Al-Sahouri, Ming-Yue Lee, Eugene Chun, Kaleeckal G. Harikumar, Laurence J. Miller, Oliver Beckstein, Wei Liu, Evidence that specific interactions play a role in the cholesterol sensitivity of G protein-coupled receptors, Biochimica et Biophysica Acta (BBA) – Biomembranes, 2021, 183557, doi: 10.1016/j.bbamem.2021.183557.
I. Winkelmann, R. Matsuoka, P. F. Meier, D. Shutin, C. Zhang, L. Orellana, R. Sexton, M. Landreh, C. V. Robinson, O. Beckstein, and D. Drew, “Structure and elevator mechanism of the mammalian sodium/proton exchanger NHE9,” The EMBO Journal, vol. 39, no. 24, p. e105908, 2020. doi: 10.15252/embj.2020105908
Ricky Sexton, Mohamadreza Fazel, Maxwell Schweiger, Steve Press ́e, and Oliver Beckstein. “Bayesian nonparametric analysis of residence times for protein-lipid interactions in molecular dynamics simulations”. bioRxiv, 2024. doi: doi: 10.1101/2024.11.07.622502 .
