Alberto Perez,

My laboratory is interested in the structures, dynamics and functionality of proteins, peptides, and nucleic acids and how their interactions lead to functionality. Our interest in recent years has been the study of molecular recognition principles in protein-peptide and protein-nucleic acids systems — to understand their role in disease, and technological applications to other areas such as sensors, or biomaterials. We develop and apply computational tools to predict structures, relative binding affinities and mechanisms of action. We co-develop and maintain the MELD (Modeling Employing Limited Data) to integrate sparse, ambiguous, and noisy data (e.g. from experiments) into simulations — thus our research is highly collaborative. At the University of Florida my group has established collaborations to incorporate new sources of experimental data such as CryoEM and NMR Chemical Shift perturbation towards structure determination. We combine these methods with more traditional approaches to map the energy landscape of the biomolecules to understand binding or folding landscapes.