Today I’m incredibly excited to share some big news: Astera Institute has committed a $5 million seed fund to help make one of my long-time dreams a reality. Since starting my lab in 2014, we’ve been working steadily toward a grand challenge in structural biology—bringing protein structures to life by animating them with their motions, captured directly from a subtle signal called diffuse scattering. We’ve made huge advances in the basic research, but I’ve always dreamed of making these tools available to everyone. With Astera’s support, we can now think BIG. Structure prediction has already transformed biology, but the next frontier is predicting protein dynamics. To get there, we need more experimental data that captures these motions—and to invite the scientific community to use it. That is what we hope to do with the Diffuse Project. I’m thrilled that Steve Meisburger has returned to my lab at Cornell University to work full-time on this dream project. We’ll be collaborating with an incredible team: James Fraser at University of California, San Francisco; Stephanie Wankowicz at Vanderbilt University; James Holton at Berkeley Lab; and Michael Wall at Los Alamos National Laboratory—along with software developers and open science leaders at Astera Institute. Stay tuned for more! https://lnkd.in/ePHZQs55
Congratulations, Nozomi! This is, indeed, a big dream project that is bound to boost our understanding of biology of health and disease, while transforming drug development! I wish your team the best of luck on this path! Given your prior experience, are you considering pressure perturbation as one of the direct means to manipulate protein dynamics?
Valentin Cracan
3mo
Fantastic news! I completely agree, we still need more experimental structural results + protein dynamics to advance our understanding of biology. As you know AlphaFold cannot predict multisubunit structures of multidomain proteins.
Tzanko Doukov
3mo
Congratulations, Nozomi, Steve, and everyone on the team! It is great that Astera Institute invested in a very important area of dynamic structural biology! Best of luck!
David Wych
3mo
Congratulations Nozomi! What a dream! This team is amazing, and I can’t wait to see where this goes
Suzette Pabit
3mo
Congratulations! 🎉 Dreams come true!!!
Marcus Collins
3mo
Hang on... do you know Stephanie Wankovicz at Vanderbilt?
Nozomi - this is so fabulous! Congratulations for staying true to your vision and ultimately attracting the perfect partner. The next years will be extra thrilling for you and all those to benefit.
Very cool! I'll look into the project.
Ho Leung Ng
3mo
Congrats, look forward to learning more
Congrats Nozomi!! This sounds awesome! And great to hear that Steve will be coming back!