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| Project Title | Molecular Modeling of Plant Hormone Receptors |
| Summary | Parasitic weeds of genera Striga, commonly called witchweed, are considered the most damaging agri- cultural agent in the developing world causing a negative economic impact worth 10 billion annually. An essential step in parasitic seed germination is sensing of a family of plant hormones called strigolactones, which are released by the host plants. This project involves computationally investigation of the mechanism of strigolactone perception in host and parasitic plants and the ligand-induced conformational change to elucidate approaches for chemical control of Striga infestations. |
| Job Description | Intern will be expected to set up and perform simulations on Blue Waters, analyze data and prepare report for submission to NCSI at the end of the internship period. Interns will use NAMD molecular dynamics package to perform simulations and use MSMBuilder, MDTraj and other related softwares to build Markov state model of receptor dynamics using the simulation data. |
| Use of Blue Waters | Project is related to a recent Blue waters allocation awarded to the PI. The interns will learn and employ large scale adaptive sampling protocols, which can be efficiently performed on the Blue Waters Supercomputer. |
| Start Date | 05/20/2017 |
| End Date | 05/20/2018 |
| Location | Shukla Group, Chemical & Biomolecular Engineering, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Urbana, IL 61801 |
| Interns | Qihua Chen
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