Virtual BSC RS: Multidimensional biology: from time-resolved structural biology to phenotypic medicines

Abstract

I lead a group split between the IBEC in Barcelona and UCL in London. Our group comprises chemists, physicists, mathematicians, engineers, biologists working together to design bionic units that mimic specific biological functions and/or introduce operations that do not exist in Nature. We apply a constructionist approach where we mimic biological complexity in the form of design principles to produce functional units from simple building blocks and their interactions. We called such an approach: Molecular Bionics. In doing so, we learned to apply and develop physical tools to the study of biology, today I’ll show two stories originated in my group where we combine computational and experimental approaches to address specific biological questions. In the first part of my talk I’ll show how to image proteins in liquid water using liquid-phase electron microscopy and how we can extract four-dimensional profiles of the proteins to show their conformational space. In the second part of my talk, I’ll show our developments on the of design phenotypic medicine, i.e. multivalent constructs capable of interacting with cells as a function of their phenotypic composition of receptors.