We finally went on our first Feig group ski trip. We went to Mount Brighton which isn't really a mountain, but rather a hill. Nevertheless it offered enough challenges for a first trip.


The weather could not have been better!

Everybody went for their first time (except for Michael) and quickly learned how to ski/snowboard:






Here are some movies of Afra, Maryam, Srini, and Sean.


Supot Hannongbua from Chulalongkorn University (Bangkok, Thailand) came to visit and discuss Mameow's research. This was a good reason to have a Bar-B-Q:


This party was also to say good-bye to Mameow, who went back home after spending a year in the Feig group, and to welcome a new member to the Feig group: Supriya Rathinasabapathy. Supriya will be working with Brian on the SimDB project.


Michael Lee from the United States Army Medical Research Institute for Infectious Diseases came to visit to discuss science and try out new ideas.




We had our first annual Feig group Christmas party. Here are a few pictures taken by Mameow:


The party was also Jana's farewell party after (almost) two successful years in the group. Jana will continue to stay involved in nucleic acid simulation as a postdoc in Rob Knight's group at the University of Colorado.

Maryam Sayadi has joined the group as a new chemistry graduate student. She will move into our new Feig group office in the basement of the chemistry building (room 18). Welcome!


A number of papers that were written during the summer have been accepted for publication. Go here for more details. Good work Jana, Seiichiro, and Andrew!


Katarzyna "Kasia" Maksimiak has joined us to help with the development and testing of scoring functions for protein structure prediction. Welcome to the group!


A new addition to the Feig family:


Emma Feig was born on September 8th and has been claiming much attention since.


Kitiyaporn "Mameow" Wittayanarakul has made the long trip from Thailand to join the group for a year. She is a graduate student at the Department of Chemistry of Chulalongkorn University in Bangkok. Welcome!

We installed the first SimDB server with nearly 4 TBs of storage. Check back soon for a first public release of our simulation database project.


We have expanded our lab to create more desks. The new desks came quickly and everybody was happy to assemble some more furniture. Here are some pictures of what the lab looks like now:


Jesse Sowell has joined the group to help us with the SimDB project over the summer. Welcome to the group!

Brian has graduated with a Master of Science in Computer Science. Congratulations!!! Brian is now a Ph.D. candidate in Computer Science and will continue to work on different aspects of the SimDB project.

Most of us (Seiichiro, Jana, Brian & Michael) went to the 1st Midwest Structural Biology Workshop organized by the QBMI at Brook Lodge in Augusta, MI.


Hugh, Serina, and Sydni have finished their CEM186H projects and presented their work in a poster session. Good job!


Hugh has presented homology models for MSH6/MSH2 and MSH3/MSH2, the human homologs of the DNA mismatch recognition protein MutS, at the University Undergraduate Research and Arts Forum. Here is a (poor) picture of Hugh explaining his work:




Seiichiro and Jana went to show their work at the Biophysical Society Meeting in Long Beach.

Biochemistry graduate student Andrew Stumpff-Kane joined the group for a lab rotation. He will be working on protein structure refinement. Welcome!


Time for the champagne: our first paper is accepted!

The paper to be published in the Journal of Chemical Physics describes Seiichiro's work on developing a refined implicit membrane model based on the Generalized Born formalism.

We are participating in the honors student chemistry CEM186H class. Three freshman students (Sydni Johnson, Serina Mazzoni, and Hugh Crosmun) will be working in the lab on simulation and modeling projects. Welcome to the group!

We have moved!

After more than a year we have left the BPS building and moved into our permanent home in the adjacent Biochemistry building (room BCH 218).

First, there were the boxes, then the furniture, (and lots of left-overs) and finally the computers. We are still settling in, but please come and visit us in our new lab!

Seiichiro went to the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in order to participate at a computational biophysics workshop organized by the Theoretical and Computational Biophysics Group at UIUC. He said that it was fun and that he learned (more) about VMD, NAMD, and how to use a haptic device.

Michael has participated in the CTBP (Center for Theoretical Biological Physics) Workshop for Theory and Computation in Molecular Biological Physics at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD). Videos of most of the lectures and tutorials are still available online.

While in San Diego, Michael has also presented new results about the refinement of predicted protein structures at the Protein Society Meeting.

We have sent off our first paper on Aug. 9th to the Journal of Chemical Physics. The paper describes Seiichiro's development of an implicit membrane based on heterogeneous dielectric environments.

Michael has presented Seiichiro's work on implicit modeling of membranes at the Gordon Research Conference for Computational Chemistry in Plymouth, New Hampshire.

Congratulations to Seiichiro and his wife Heather! Their daughter Miya was born on the 20th of June. We wish them all the best of luck.

Seiichiro, Jana, and Michael have participated with posters at the Symposium on the Evolution of Biomolecular Structure organized by the Center of Biological Modeling. Here is a picture of Seiichiro talking about his work on implicit modeling of membranes:




The SimDB trajectory analyis web service is now operational. It allows the analysis of selected structural properties, MMPB/SA-type energetic scoring of conformational ensembles, and conformational clustering from user-submitted protein and nucleic acid molecular dynamics trajectories.



Our cluster has arrived! 44 dual-CPU compute nodes, 2 storage nodes, 2 switches, 1 login node, 1 control node and rack hardware from Dell were assembled in a week and are now generating lots of heat (and simulation data, of course).