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October 2-8Padova, Italy |
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Cluster and Grid Computing
for the 3D Structure Determination of Viruses with Unknown Symmetry
Dan C. Marinescu
School of Computer Science
University of Central Florida, Orlando, Fl, 32816, USA |
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| Friday, October 8th, 2004 2:30pm -- 4:30pm |
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Abstract
The protein shell of all virus structures resolved to this date exhibit
some form of symmetry, most of them are spherical viruses with icosahedral
symmetry. The study of viruses whose symmetry is not known or of structures
which do not exhibit any symmetry, such as the genetic material of a virus,
are considerably more challenging.Increasing the resolution of the structure determination to 3-9 A and solving structures with no symmetry represents a significant leap in virus structure determination based upon electron microscopy (EM). Computing is a major component of the 3D structure determination process. Nowadays it is not feasible to increase the resolution of the structure determination of large macromolecules like viruses, or to solve structures with no symmetry without novel parallel algorithms and environments enabling structural biologists to use parallel systems, clusters of workstations, or providing access to grid computing. |
| Tutorial slides are available here (about 12MB). |