Speaker: Steve Plotkin, UBC Physics

Title: How does a protein fold? The effects of structure and many body 
interactions.

Abstract: The theory for how a protein folds up to a biologically
functional structure has occupied researchers for the last few
decades. The difficulties stem from an incomplete knowledge of an
accurate Hamiltonian, as well as non-trivial aspects of polymer
physics that complicate the kinetics of folding. Here will give a
fairly long introduction to some of the central issues in protein
folding, and then go on to describe some recent results showing that
relaxation rates increase significantly as the folding mechanism
becomes increasingly heterogeneous. Time permitting, I will discuss
the role of many-body interactions in the Hamiltonian, and show how
accounting for them is essential for predicting how a protein folds
up.