Good afternoon, everyone.
My name is Pho.
I'm a senior majoring in biochemistry
and minoring in statistics here at Mount Holyoke College.
It's my pleasure today to stand here and present to you
my summer experience.
So last summer, I worked with Professor Alan van Giessen
at Mount Holyoke College in the chemistry department.
We were doing computational chemistry research,
and I was very nervous at first because I am not a computer
science major, but everything turned out to be fine,
and I liked what I was doing.
So I can't wait to share with you all my excitement
during summer.
So before going into the details of my research topic,
I wanted to refresh your memory about protein function.
So each protein has its own 3D structure,
and therefore it can carry out its specific function--
like enzyme, or cell signaling, or ligand binding,
and structural support.
That's why we are all here, thanks to the proteins that
function in our body.
So because the protein has this very specific function,
it's usually regarded as the building blocks of life.
But as much as protein is very important to our life,
it's also very prone to degradation.
And in protein language, it's called protein denaturation.
As the picture here shows, when denaturation happens,
the normal protein will lose its native structure,
and it becomes very extended.
That's why it cannot function properly.
And this is very devastating to our life,
because the consequence can be the disruption of cell
activity, and even cell death.
So I want to focus today on the denaturation
of the protein due to the effect of temperature.
So when you think of temperature,
it can be hot and cold.
And hot denaturation is very familiar to many of you,
if you notice, because in your kitchen every day,
when you cook egg, the protein called albumin in the egg white
is denatured.
It becomes opaque.
So my project aimed at studying cold denaturation of protein
in the presence of crowding agents.
So what is crowding agent?
Crowding agents are biomolecules that
co-exist with your protein of interest in the environment
that you want to study.
So crowding agent mimics the cellular environment.
At any given period of time, your protein inside your body
never exists by itself.
It's always surrounded by thousands and thousands
of molecules.
So if we incorporate crowding agents,
it will give us better understanding
of how the protein behaves inside your cell.
And in order to approach to answer my research question,
I used a method called molecular dynamics simulation.
This is a very simple one that illustrates.
So molecular dynamics is a piece of code
that enables you to solve the numerical values
of the equation of Newtonian equation of motion.
So basically, it will give you the position, velocity,
and acceleration of a particular particle at a given time.
This is the MD mode that I wrote over the summer.
This is a very basic one for a system of 10 particles.
So you only need to input the initial position
for each particle and that initial velocity
for each particle.
Also, you have to define the temperature
at which you are interested in studying your protein.
So if you're interested in my research topic,
I can tell you more about it after this panel.
And this is the most important of this presentation.
[LAUGHTER]
This is summer fun that I had here.
I had the opportunity to work with really awesome people,
and one of them is here today.
Is Shanza
Hi, you guys.
[LAUGHTER]
And also, unexpectedly, I was enrolled in the Cycling 101
class, just because my advisor, Alan van Giessen,
he is a really big fan of cycling,
so he taught us everything we need to know about cycling.
We watched Tour de France every morning
before we start working in lab.
[LAUGHTER]
And then our group, we went to Amherst
to enjoy Antonio's Pizza, went to froyo ice cream,
and also hiking event going on on campus during summer.
And most importantly, Mount Holyoke College
has put together a summer talk series that
features a lot of research that's going on in Five College
Consortium, and that was very interesting for us
as scientists to know more about what's going.
And my advice to you is that, don't
be afraid of what you haven't known before,
what's not exposed to you, because you might
be surprised on your ability.
Because for me, I'm not a computer science major,
but after this summer, I learned so much,
and to continue in that, I will enroll in a computer science
class next semester.
[APPLAUSE]