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Hong GuoProfessor, Biochemistry & Cellular and Molecular Biology Email: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. Address: Office: Mossman 302 1311 Cumberland Avenue |
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Education and Biography
Ph.D., Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA
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Research Interests
My research focuses on application and development of computational approaches to understand biological structure and function. One of our research directions is to investigate catalytic mechanisms and specificity/promiscuity of enzymes and inhibitor binding processes by use of state-of-the art computational approaches. We are interested in understanding the origin of high catalytic efficiency and selectivity/promiscuity of enzyme-catalyzed reactions. These studies would, in addition to being of fundamental scientific importance, also improve the basis for designing inhibitors, efficient drugs and enzyme mimics. We use molecular dynamics (MD) simulations, free energy calculations, mixed quantum mechanical/molecular mechanical (QM/MM) methods and some other computational approaches to address questions in this research area. Several enzyme systems are currently under investigations in our laboratory. Another direction of our research is to integrate structural information (such as 3-dimensional protein models) with other datasets for understanding the enzymatic and regulatory pathways required for Crassulacean Acid Metabolism (CAM) of plants, which provides an excellent opportunity to engineer enhanced photosynthetic performance and water use efficiency (WUE) into bioenergy crops. We also study structural and dynamic features of proteins and try to understand the forces that that stabilize proteins. Home page: http://www.bio.utk.ed/guo/ |
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Selected Publications
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