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Tough biological questions require powerful methods : The devil is in the details

QUICK INFORMATION
Type
Seminar
Start Date
11-02-2020 09:00
End Date
11-02-2020 10:00
Location
Room 337, Central Building
Speaker's name
Nicolas FOOS
Speaker's institute
ILL Grenoble, France
Contact name
Claudine Roméro
Host name
Gordon Leonard
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Structural biology is a powerful approach to understand subtle life’s phenomenon. One of this complex event is the transcription. During the early stages of embryogenesis, the body segmentation is regulated by the HOX transcription factors. These proteins are highly homologous within their super-family but can act with a very high specificity. The specificity rely on combination of a motif which is a prolongation of the recognition helix of the homeodomain and on the partner recruitment to form a complex of DNA sequence recognition.

Deciphered such mechanisms requires sharp tools. One of the first step to determine X-ray crystallography structure is to collect the best possible datasets and to scale to lead to the most accurate estimation of the anomalous signal. Multiple strategies can be used for achieving this goal.

Extending the multi-crystals averaging to serial crystallography approach offer new challenges and requires innovative approach to solve experimental features such as non-isomorphism and the large number of partial datasets. The idea is to mimic the natural evolution process with a genetic algorithm to obtain an optimized / evolved dataset by assembling and selecting a large number of partial datasets collected with serial approach.

The power of serial approach changes the outline of the field by opening the way to the time-resolved studies. The current state of the art of time-resolved studies is centered on XFEL but can be brought back to synchrotron.

Visitors from off-site please contact Claudine Roméro tel +33 (0)4 76 88 20 27 to arrange for a gate pass.
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