Proteins
perform a variety of critical functions, ranging from metabolism to
transport and from signaling to regulation. With the completion
of the sequencing of the human genome, for example, we now know in
principle all the proteins produced by the human body. If we
understood how these proteins interact with each other, we would
be a big step closer to understanding how the cells in living beings
work. Such an understanding would also open up new approaches to the
design of drugs that could treat or even cure many diseases.
Proteins can be seen as tiny robots. In this talk, I will explore
the similarities between proteins and robots and discuss how insights
developed by the robotics community can be applied successfully in
structural molecular biology. I will present two examples of such
applications. First, I will discuss how ideas from sampling-based
motion planning can be applied to predict the structure of proteins,
starting from the information contained in the human genome.
Second, I will present how concepts from robot kinematics are able to
efficiently generate the self-motion a protein is able to
perform. In both cases, the insights from robotics permit us to
significantly improve the state of the art.
Biography
Oliver Brock is an
Assistant Professor of Computer Science at the University of
Massachusetts Amherst. He received his Computer Science Diploma in 1993
from the Technical University of Berlin and his Masters and Ph.D. in
Computer Science from Stanford University in 1994 and 2000,
respectively. He was a co-founder and CTO of an Internet startup called
AllAdvantage.com. He also held post-doc positions at Rice University
and Stanford University. At the University of Massachusetts Amherst,
Oliver is affiliated with the Robotics and Biology Laboratory, the
Computational Biology Laboratory, and the Laboratory for Perceptual
Robotics. His research focuses on Autonomous Mobile Manipulation and
the application of robotic algorithms to problems in Structural
Molecular Biology.