This action funds an NSF Minority Postdoctoral Research Fellowship for FY 2004. The goal of the fellowship is to increase the participation of minority scientists at the postdoctoral level and to prepare them for positions of scientific leadership in academia and industry. To attain this goal, the fellowship provides opportunities for postdoctoral training and research of the highest quality to recent doctoral recipients. It is expected that Fellows supported through these fellowships will play important roles in training of the future workforce.
The research and training plan is entitled "Computational analysis, prediction and design of protein-DNA interfaces." A database of protein-DNA molecular structures is being used to develop a description of the biophysical forces that govern the interactions of sequence specific homing endonucleases and DNA. This description has been incorporated into a computational algorithm for the prediction and design of proteins that bind DNA in a sequence-specific manner. This approach promises to successfully reproduce protein amino-acid sequences at DNA interfaces at a level comparable to the most successful protein folding algorithms. Over the course of this fellowship these approaches will be refined and developed to yield an even more accurate description of protein-DNA interactions and then applied to the prediction and design of these interactions.
