Dokholyan Group

e are a theoretical/computational group in the Department of Biochemisty and Biophysics at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, School of Medicine. Our group is also affiliated with the Program in Cellular and Molecular Biophysics, Carolina Center for Genome Sciences, Bioinformatics and Computational Biology Training Program, Neuroscience Center, and Lineberger Comprehensive Cancer Center.

e study the physical nature of interactions between atoms, molecules, cells, and organisms. The underlying question throughout our research is how these interactions shape the complex organization, behavior, and evolution of biomolecules and organisms. To approach this question we have been studying structure, dynamics, function, and evolution of biological molecules. Such a broad approach is necessary to tie together the diverse pieces of knowledge of molecular properties and evolution that is to us.

ur present principal effort is directed towards understanding the nature of physical interactions between amino acids in proteins and the impact of these interactions on the chemical and biological properties of proteins and, at a higher level, cells and organisms.

Tools

H-predictor - The tool for predicting protein hinge regions, the "weakest" structural elements (Ding et al. Structure, 14: 5-14 (2006)).

iFold - A web portal for interactive protein folding simulations (Sharma et al. Bioinformatics, 22: 2693-2694 (2006)).

iFoldRNA - A web portal for three-dimensional RNA structure prediction and folding (Sharma et al. Bioinformatics, in press (2008)).

Eris - A web portal for protein stability estimations. (Yin et al. Nature Methods, 4: 466-467 (2007)).