Ribosome Meeting in Heidelberg

published 2016-11-25

Last week, I attended a meeting on ribosomes. All the german experts on all aspects of ribosome research at one place. I gave a talk on the simulations I'm trying to establish. Given that there were like only two more simulation guys in the audience, the feedback that I got was in general quite positive.

This is what I saw in the morning from the hotel window, after a dreamless night of rendering the last videos for my talk.

CPU-Time Granted

published 2016-10-28

Our computational proposal with Helmut and others has just been approved! We will receive 67 million core-hours to study RNA-protein interactions within a prokaryotic ribosome. Thanks to the Leibniz Rechnenzentrum in Munich, Germany, our simulations of more than 2 million atoms will not take ages and I'll bring some news soon, hopefully.

The figure shows the tRNA at the catalytic center of the ribosome (yellow), the exit tunnel for newly synthesized proteins (gray surface), and two ribosomal proteins (red and blue). The lines with dots are chemical bonds between atoms, just to put it all into context.

Highly Cited Paper

published 2016-10-21

Good news! In June 2016, our review on sigma-hole calculations was ranked by Thomson Reuters Web of Science in the top 1 % of the academic field of chemistry. No matter that the paper has received 10 citations so far...

German Biophysical Society Meeting

published 2016-10-10

For the first time, I visited Erlangen. I presented a poster on DNA relaxation, which I recycled from the Hünfeld workshop. Hard to say if this was the reason why it attracted much less attention than before. There was a special session on electron and proton transfer, but I got the impression that the conference was biased towards lipids and their aggregates. For instance, there were very few contributions on the intrinsically disordered proteins, which was - as far as I've heard - one of the hottest topics on the American Biophysical Society Meeting...

I will definitely remember the talk of Peter Tieleman about lipid localization in membranes studied by coarse-grained simulations. For me, his talk was the example of how not to present a plenary talk if you are the leader in the field. Some of the (positive) reactions afterwards only showed that people tend to believe data more if presented by a "big name."

As a second runner, I took part in a relay run during Sommerfest of the Max Planck Institute for Biophysical Chemistry. 11 am, 30 °C, 5 minutes full steam. Thanks the team.

published 2016-06-22

Poster in Hünfeld

published 2016-06-04

Workshop on Computer Simulations and Theory of Biomolecules in Hünfeld is a pretty traditional event (runs since 2001). I've been there already for a couple of times, but this year I took part as a member of the organizing Department from Göttingen. As usual, the two days were fairly relaxed. The talks are given only by students and postdocs, people know each other from before and spent much time discussing science. I contributed with a poster on DNA relaxation. Shake it off, DNA!

"h is an abbreviation for huhohshdhjha"

qstat -help (SGE)

published 2016-05-22

My recent Chemical Reviews article in its 150 most frequent words. Appreciation to python and Inkscape...

published 2016-02-19

Farewell Jülich

published 2016-01-04

My Humboldt fellowship is over. After two years I'm leaving Jülich to face new challenges. It's time for some statistics. During that time the following were "produced!":

1 daughter born
6 peer-reviewed articles published
9 conferences or workshops visited
56 postcards received
156 analog photographs taken
1470 EUR spent in Seekasino FZJ
3180 digital photographs taken
4894 km ridden to FZJ and back
many TB of data generated and analyzed
many CPU-hours consumed