Principal Investigator Jeremy L England
Project Website http://www.englandlab.com/
Professeo England's research group studies theoretical questions in molecular biophysics.
Living things are good at collecting information about their surroundings, and at putting that information to use through the ways they interact with their environment so as to survive and replicate themselves. Thus, talking about biology inevitably leads to talking about decision, purpose, and function.
At the same time, living things are also made of atoms that, in and of themselves, have no particular function. Rather, molecules and the atoms from which they are built exhibit well-defined physical properties having to do with how they bounce off of, stick to, and combine with each other across space and over time.
Making sense of life at the molecular level is all about building a bridge between these two different ways of looking at the world. For example, in the diagram above, we can describe a protein (the orange, red, and blue thing) as acting like a sensor, because some small molecule (the gold, star-shaped thing) can bind to the protein and make it change its shape so that it can now stick to another protein (the green thing). In this language, the small molecule acts like a message, and the protein it binds to acts like an interpreter of the message.
At the same time, the physics of this process (called "allosteric motion") can be modeled in such a way that we come to comprehend how the physical composition of the protein in question makes this kind of signal processing possible. Once we make the physical model, it turns out that understanding what's going is nearly as simple as understanding how a see-saw like the one in the above diagram works.
The mission of the research group is to dig up these gems of physical simplicity in biological systems, so as to make better sense of life's molecular architecture.