NIC Excellence Project Awarded to Prof. Holger Gohlke

The NIC Peer Review Board regularly awards the title "NIC Excellence Project" to outstanding simulation projects. At its April meeting, the board decided to award the title to Prof. Holger Gohlke (University of Düsseldorf) for his project on ethylene-induced development processes in plants.

The small molecule ethylene is a gaseous plant hormone known to induce various developmental processes in plants, including fruit ripening, after binding to the plant receptor ETR1 (ethylene response 1). His project “Structural dynamics of apo, agonist-, and antagonist-bound full-length ETR1” studies how ethylene binding is transduced from the transmembrane domain of ETR1 to its C-terminal cytoplasmatic domains and how ethylene binding changes the structure and dynamics of full-length ETR1 using molecular simulations on the JUWELS Booster module. The studies are expected to provide pathways of information flow that lead to conformational or stability changes in the receptor. In collaboration with plant biochemists, an experimentally validated view of the structural dynamics of full-length ETR1 will be provided at the atomistic level.

For more details, see https://go.fzj.de/nic-ep-2023-1.

Contact: Dr. Alexander Trautmann, coordination-office@fz-juelich.de