An international team consisting of Cecilia Clementi(Rice University), Mauro Maggioni (Duke University) Shantenu Jha (Rutgers University), Glenn Martyna (BM T. J. Watson Laboratory ), Charlie Laughton (University of Nottingham), Ben Leimkuhler ( University of Edinburgh), Iain Bethune (University of Edinburgh) and Panos Parpas(Imperial College) are supported through the SI2-CHE program for the development of ExTASY -- Extensible Toolkit for Advanced Sampling and analYsis, -- a conceptual and software framework that provides a step-change in the sampling of the conformational space of macromolecular systems. Specifically, ExTASY is a lightweight toolkit to enable first-class support for ensemble-based simulations and their seamless integration with dynamic analysis capabilities and ultra-large time step integration methods, whilst being extensible to other community software components via well-designed and standard interfaces.
The primary impacts of this project are in the biological sciences. This software advances our understanding of biologically important systems, as it can be used to obtain fast and accurate sampling of the conformational dynamics of stable proteins; a prerequisite for the accurate prediction of thermodynamic parameters and biological functions. It also allows tackling systems like intrinsically disordered proteins, which can be beyond the reach of classical structural biology. Along with the research itself, the PIs are involved with outreach programs to attract high school students to science.
