Speaker: Martin Gruebele

Title: Proteins under pressure

Abstract: Proteins have rich phase diagrams that depend on temperature, pressure and crowding. I will discuss a variety of experiments and supercomputer simulations that reveal how pressure can be used to study folding, how proteins behave under “negative pressure,” and what the effect of osmotic pressure on proteins is inside cells. It turns out that like water, proteins can have a ‘critical point’ where two states merge and become a single state, and this could affect protein dynamics and function in vitro and in the cell.