Prof.  Marc  Baaden
Institut de Biologie Physico-Chimique,  France

Title: MolPlay: Bringing Interactive Molecular Simulations and Analyses to Biochemistry and Molecular Biology

Abstract:

Interactive molecular simulations and analysis (IMSA) offer immense potential to advance biochemical and molecular biology research and education, but their uptake is still limited. This talk will introduce MolPlay, a bootable USB platform designed to democratize access to IMSA research tools. The talk will explore the capabilities of IMSA techniques and present a taxonomy of common interactive modeling tasks such as assembly, deformation, and rare event sampling, with a focus on the study of membranes and membrane proteins. MolPlay provides a turnkey environment with curated hands-on examples that enable versatile use scenarios from outreach and education to research software distribution. Initial testing at an international workshop has shown that MolPlay has been well received and effectively lowers the barriers to entry for IMSA. By consolidating more than a decade of expertise into one accessible platform, MolPlay represents a significant step towards wider adoption of these powerful computational techniques in biochemistry and molecular biology. Try it out for yourself at molplay.mol3d.tech.

Biography:

Marc Baaden is a senior research director at CNRS. He is currently head of the Theoretical Biochemistry Unit UPR9080 at CNRS. He is co-author of > 130 publications and is well known for molecular dynamics studies on membrane proteins published in Nature, PNAS, PLoS Comput Biol... , etc. Trained as a physical chemist, his research focuses on biological systems and phenomena at membranes and interfaces, where water and ion transport play a special role. He is internationally known for interactive molecular design approaches with multi-scale representations using unique in-house software. His outstanding research on protein simulations, bioinformatics, and permeating membrane systems has led to many successful applications.His interdisciplinary approach combines chemistry, physics, biological sciences, and computer science with state of art technological developments such as virtual reality and tangible smart objects.