Ricky Sexton
Ricky is a graduate student in physics who is interested in the effects of lipid membranes on signaling proteins. 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 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. 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, ISSN 0005-2736, https://doi.org/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
