[Slaam] SLAAM Seminar Monday, Jan 30, 9am ET: Andriy Goychuk (MIT)

[SLAAM Distribution List]

Dear enthusiasts of the SLAAM seminars,

We hope your 2023 is off to a great start! We invite you to join us for the spring semester’s first Soft Living Active and Adaptive Matter (SLAAM)<https://physics.ucmerced.edu/slaam> seminar, to be given by Dr. Andriy Goychuk (MIT) on Monday, January 30, at 9am Pacific/11am Central/12 noon Eastern time, with the title Folding patterns in heterogeneous active polymers<https://physics.ucmerced.edu/sites/physics.ucmerced.edu/files/page/documents/andriy_goychuk_slaam.pdf>.

https://ucmerced.zoom.us/j/92693607475?pwd=TnI5dDhRRnYvejNZK2xNN0s4M0R5UT09
Zoom Meeting ID: 926 9360 7475   |   Passcode: 223642

As usual, there will be a 15 min informal Q&A at the end of the hour. Graduate students will have an opportunity to interact with the speaker in an informal setting during the "Meet the speaker" timeslot just after the talk. Please join if the time works for you.

Abstract:
The folding of various biopolymers, ranging from proteins to chromosomes, into specific conformations is vital for cellular function. Longstanding research has elucidated basic principles of polymer folding with equilibrium thermodynamics. However, thermodynamic constraints such as the fluctuation-dissipation relation can cease to hold in cells, whose organization and regulation involve active processes that provide local excitations. Here, by using analytical theory, we investigate the response of a polymer’s conformation to excitations that are heterogeneous in magnitude, correlated along the polymer sequence or, at local hot spots, exhibit temporal patterns that can represent protein (un)binding cycles on chromatin. We characterize how these different types of excitations can lead to specific folding patterns, by eliciting effective long-ranged attraction or repulsion. However, we also find that the folding patterns of an active polymer cannot be distinguished from a passive polymer through structural data, such as contact probability maps, alone. Therefore, in closing, we discuss the different fluctuation properties, such as coherent motion, that can be expected to arise in such systems.

About the speaker:
Dr. Andriy Goychuk is a postdoctoral associate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he will transition to an EMBO Long-Term postdoctoral fellowship in February 2023. He is broadly interested in applying the methods and tools of theoretical biophysics, statistical mechanics and nonlinear dynamics to biological phenomena. Together with Professor Arup K. Chakraborty and Professor Mehran Kardar, he is currently investigating the formation of transcriptional condensates on chromatin and the conformational dynamics of actively driven polymers.

Dr. Goychuk has studied Physics at the Ludwig-Maximilians-University of Munich. Together with Professor Erwin Frey, he investigated different biological systems, ranging from the scale of proteins to the scale of cell dynamics, which have mechanochemical couplings. His thesis was honored with the Arnold Sommerfeld PhD prize.


See you there!

Best regards,
Dan Beller
on behalf of the SLAAM organizing team

To join the SLAAM mailing list, please sign up here<https://urldefense.proofpoint.com/v2/url?u=https-3A__docs.google.com_forms_d_e_1FAIpQLScTyzEuuE7TfrrapgP4tzN-5FoPSqbBhURUxa9-2Dzc8USnY1IPzA_viewform&d=DwMFAw&c=WO-RGvefibhHBZq3fL85hQ&r=6T170XR90Za4-nl9r1e8-WfEJbvH5g5hJbA9UumqfWQ&m=NK4EGo1VvrDiYSxdvOUJXgCkEAzTrQzNpQi-P59LZiKL_lMA3briJm9KQh9Y3suN&s=3hc1lEhiJwBLtMEr12Z9K5XtZaVlEfOZKYXGtXCjRDg&e=>. If you’re a postdoc interested in giving a SLAAM talk, we invite you to register your interest on that webform.


Daniel Beller
Assistant Professor
Department of Physics and Astronomy
Johns Hopkins University
pages.jh.edu/dbeller3
(he/him/his)

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.ucmerced.edu/pipermail/slaam/attachments/20230125/74bd7064/attachment.htm>