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Peter Minary

Personal photo - Peter Minary

Peter Minary

Research Lecturer in Computational Biology

Wolfson Building, Parks Road, Oxford OX1 3QD

Interests

Motivated by grand challenges in structural and molecular biology, our research combines applied statistics and scientific computing to perform applications that could not have been accomplished years ago.  Our work on algorithmic development is equally driven by our research interest in nanoscale design, experimental refinement, molecular genetics and related collaborations with both computational and experimental laboratories.

One major area of our methodology development is inspired by the challenges in exploring the conformational space of large biological macromolecules.  Besides the development of basic optimization and sampling algorithms, we introduced a linear complexity chain closure algorithm, which enabled the use of arbitrary user defined degrees of freedom in a protocol called (Hierarchical) Natural Move Monte Carlo or (H)NM-MC.  All these and other relevant algorithms have been implemented into our software package, MOSAICS, http://www.cs.ox.ac.uk/mosaics.

The potential impact of these new methods has been demonstrated by notable works such as a comprehensive investigation of the protein fold universe, aiding the design of RNA nanostructures and fitting molecular structures against their Cryo-electron microscopy images.  As such, our objectives include both the mechanistic study of structural phenomena using purely computational investigations and the better interpretation of experimental results. 

Representative publications on completed application projects and related algorithmic developments can be found here: http://www.cs.ox.ac.uk/mosaics/publications

Our research interest continues to be driven by application oriented method and software development in computational structural biology.   Most notably, we are interested in

1) Functional motion of nanomachines using modelling and Cryo-EM fitting

2) Structural Immunoinformatics; antibody–antigen, MHC–protein binding

3) Modelling and designing large DNA structures like the nucleosome particle

4) Modelling RNA junctions, nanostructures and RNA–protein interactions

Selected Publications

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Current Students

Past Students

Florian Störtz