Long Liang
Long Liang majored in Biology in his undergraduate study, and shifted to Physics for his PhD study. He hopes to combine his background in Biology and Physics to understand life in terms of the more fundamental Physical laws.
Long works on neurotransmitter transporters: These are proteins that sit in the membrane of nerve cells. They are of crucial importance in the process of signal transduction in in the brain. They function by pumping neurotransmitter into the nerve cell. He uses modelling approaches to build three dimensional models of transporter proteins for which we do not have experimental structures yet.
In his rotation project he constructed a structural model of a neurotransmitter transporter, a human transmembrane protein. The model, based on structures of homologous prokaryotic proteins, was validated against known experimental data and performs well in classical MD simulations in a native-like membrane environment.
Long is now part of the Complex Materials Group and works on his PhD under Professor Yang Jiao.
