Mathematical Biology

Minxin Chen; Ling Yang; Shenggao Zhou                                

Aqueous solvent plays a significant role in dynamical processes of biological molecules, such as conformational changes,molecular recognition, and molecular assembly. Implicit-solvent models are efficient descriptions of such dynamics of biomolecular interactions.Central in such models is the solute-solvent interface that separates solute atoms from the solvent that is coarse-grained. We develop a series of models to describe the dynamics of the solute-solvent interface, probe the effect of solvent as continuum fluids, and study biomolecular interactions in an aqueous environment. We also analyze the mathematical properties of the models and develop numerical software packages for the community.

Another topic of our research is developing multiscale mathematical models, numerical algorithms, and simulation software for modeling and simulating specific large bio-molecular systems, such as ion-channel, DNA chains and other interesting and important biomolecular systems.With these models, algorithms and software, many experimental results could be reproduced, understood better and predicted in computers.