Professor Ron Elber


972-2-6585484

972-2-6513742
Department of Physical Chemistry and Department of Biological Chemistry, The Fritz Haber Research Center and The Wolfson Center for Applied Structural Biology, Hebrew University Jerusalem 91904, Israel
E-mail him at ron@fh.huji.ac.il



General field of investigation:

Dynamics and structure of biomolecules

Topics of Research:


Kinetics and thermodynamics of peptide and protein folding. Ligand diffusion in proteins. Reaction path studies of conformational changes and allosteric transitions in biomacromolecules. Simulation of photodissociation processes in globins. Simulations of membrane proteins. Development of mean field approaches to structure determination and to studies of protein dynamics. Development of path integral approaches to study long time dynamics in condensed phases. Implementation of molecular dynamics code on parallel computers.
The molecular dynamics package - moil - that was developed at the RE group is available from ala.fh.huji.ac.il

Figure: A diffusion pathway is shown in which carbon monoxide exits the heme pocket (the binding site of the protein leghemoglobin) to the solvent. The backbone of the protein is in green, the heme group is in red and the diffusion path of the carbon monoxide is in blue. The computations employed a mean field approach -- LES to determine plausible escape pathways. The proposed pathways were further refined by reaction path calculations. Finally the potential of mean force and the diffusion rate were estimated along the suggested pathway and compared favorably with experiments. More details on our diffusion work (on other systems) can be found in publications: [44], [47], and [50]. A related mean field approach was employed extensively in structure determination of biomolecules (references [45] and [52]). An example for our reaction path calculations can be found in [46] in which the permeation pathway of an ion through a passive channel (gramicidin) is considered.

Funding

Funding for the RE group is provided by the NIH, by the Israel Science Foundation, the Israel Science Ministry, and by the Binational Science Foundation.

Group Members

Ms. Ora Schuler
Mr. Gil Shafran
Ms. Lidar Artzi
Mr. Assaf Zemel
Mr. Dror Tobi
Dr. Debasisa Mohanty
Dr. Roberto Olender
Dr. Jarek Meller
OPEN: Post Doc Position, e-mail Ron Elber for details

Representative Recent Publications

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