Speaker: Roseanna Zia, University of Missouri, US

The Antibodies in Solution: a LINXS – NIST Webinar Series provides background information related to the currently ongoing LINXS antibody research program. This is a concerted experimental and theoretical effort that aims to investigate the properties of monoclonal antibodies in solution, which comprise a major platform for potential drug candidates and are of high academic and pharmaceutical interest. An international consortium of researchers at academic institutions, research centers, NIST and Novartis has teamed up for this. Didactical lectures given by members of the consortium on different experimental and theoretical topics that are highly relevant for state-of-the-art antibody research as well as insights from pharmaceutical industry will be broadcasted. A central aspect of the webinar series will be to illustrate the full power of neutron and X-ray scattering science that can be achieved in combination with complementary experimental methods and different unifying simulation techniques.

Abstract:

Although recent work showed that the speedup of bacterial protein synthesis with growth rate is driven by physical transport, diffusion alone is too slow to bring together matching translation molecules in crowded cytoplasm. Noting that knocking out interactions between ribosomal L12 and elongation factor Tu (EF-Tu) slows translation in vitro, we developed a physico-chemical model of the Escherichia coli cytoplasm including explicit EF-Tu·L12 interactions and elongation reaction kinetics. We found that these interactions shorten the time ribosomes must wait to test new tRNA, doubling elongation speed. In this talk, I focus on the development of our computational model to represent patchy colloidal interactions in a dense suspension, incorporating chemical kinetics from experimental data. I will also discuss our progress in merging this model with our parallelized Accelerated Stokesian dynamics, enabling accurate representation of very large polydisperse systems of interacting colloids.