Klaus Schulten

Director, Computational and Theoretical Biophysics Group, Department of Physics and Department of Chemistry, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign

Klaus Schulten’s group at the Beckman Institute of the University of Illinois utilizes advances in physical theory and computing to model organisms across many levels of organization, from molecules to cells to networks. The research has been driven by problems in biomedicine, such as understanding neural development and processing, solving the mechanisms of bioenergetic proteins like bacteriorhodopsinor light harvesting complexes, the recognition and regulation of DNA by proteins, unraveling the molecular basis of the bodys lipid metabolism and of the mechanical properties of cells, and most recently determining transport through aquaporins.

Most research in the Schulten group involves collaborations with experimental laboratories. In fact, Schulten has initiated significant experimental research, e.g., detecting biological transport through photobleaching, spin chemistry methods and chemical magnetic field effects, MRI microscopy, and protein structure analysis. During the past ten years, Schulten has completed many different modeling projects that directly complemented experiments by collaborators and were published jointly. Recently, these included the map formation in the visual cortex, MRI microscopy, the morphogenesis of the lateral geniculate nucleus, analysis of an artificial membrane, solution of the structure of a protein by crystallography and modeling, a high density lipoprotein, a novel DNA-protein complex, hydration around a novel water mimicking DNA analogue rotation of the iron-sulfur protein domain in the bc1 complex, low force stretching in the muscle protein titin, hydrostatic pressure effects on protein-DNA recognition, and water conduction in aquaporins.