This action funds an NSF Postdoctoral Research Fellowship in Biological Informatics for 2000.
The research and training plan is in the area of Molecular Biophysics and is entitled "Mechanisms into the folding of Arc Repressor: A theoretical study". In this proposal, a theoretical investigation into the mechanism of the folding of Arc Repressor using developments in the study of kinetics and dynamics of protein systems will be presented. A Master Equation for describing the folding kinetics of protein models (recently demonstrated by Scheraga), as well as the stochastic path approach of Elber, will be used in a corroborative way to elucidate the particular kinetic mechanism of the well-studied Arc Repressor. While the emphasis of this proposal is on application of existing models of protein folding of Arc Repressor, specific theoretical extensions will be developed both with regard to numerical methods and optimizations and with alternative formulations of the model itself.