Journey through Molecular Biophysics: When Many Molecules Come Close

<strong>Seminar of the School of Physical Sciences -------------------------------------------------</strong> Title:<strong> Journey through Molecular Biophysics: When Many Molecules Come Close</strong> Speaker: <strong>Pradipta Bandyopadhyay (SCIS, JNU)</strong> Date:<strong> April 21, 2016</strong> <strong>Abstract: </strong>Molecular biophysics aims to understand complexity of biology at molecular level. In this talk, first a brief history of theoretical and computational molecular biophysics will be given. Then how only a handful of thermodynamic quantities are required to describe a variety of equilibrium phenomena in biophysics will be discussed. Finally our on-going effort to understand the molecular crowding on the equilibrium and transport properties of macromolecules will be described. In this section our study of diffusion of proteins in a bacterial cytoplasm will be described from both numerical and analytical point of view. Finally a glimpse of our current work on understanding water distribution around DNA in a crowded environment will be given.