Molecular Structure Elucidation from 3D Electron Microscopy

Speaker:	Professor Chandrajit BAJAJ
		Center for Computational Visualization
		Department of Computer Sciences
		Institute for Computational Engineering and Sciences
		University of Texas at Austin

Title:		"Molecular Structure Elucidation from 3D Electron
		 Microscopy"

Date:		Tuesday, 24 March, 2009

Time:		2:00pm - 3:00pm

Venue:		Lecture Theatre G
		(Chow Tak Sin Lecture Theatre, near lifts 25/26)
		HKUST

Abstract:

With continued advances in three dimensional Electron Microscopy (3D EM)
one is progressively able to elucidate the structural building blocks of
proteins (and nucleic acids) at varying resolutions. In this talk, I shall
discuss algorithms to detect the secondary structural motifs (helices and
sheets) from proteins for which the volumetric 3D EM maps are
reconstructed at 5-10 Angstrom resolution. Additionally, I shall also show
that when the resolution is coarser than 10 Angstrom, some of the tertiary
structural molecular motifs can be elucidated from 3D EM. For each of
these algorithms, we employ techniques from computational geometry and
differential topology, especially the computation of stable/unstable
manifolds of certain critical points of distance functions of molecular
surface boundaries.


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Biography:

Chandrajit L. Bajaj is the director of the Center for Computational
Visualization, in the Institute for Computational and Engineering Sciences
(ICES) and a Professor of Computer Sciences at the University of Texas at
Austin. Bajaj holds the Computational Applied Mathematics Chair in
Visualization. He is also an affiliate faculty member of Mathematics,
Electrical Engineering, Bio-Medical Engineering, and also a member of the
Institutes of Cell and Molecular Biology, and Neurosciences, the Center
for Learning and Memory, and the Center for Perceptual Systems. He is an
author and editor of over 300 publications, including 225 papers, 25 book
chapters, and 1 book and 3 edited volurmes. He is on the editorial boards
for the International Journal of Computational Geometry and Applications,
the ACM Transactions on Graphics, the ACM Computing Surveys, the SIAM
Journal on Imaging Studies, and the International Journal for
Computational Vision and Biomechanics. He is on numerous national and
international conference committees, and has served as a scientific
consultant to national labs and industry. He is also a fellow of the
American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS).