Gabrielle Illava: From SERCCS to PhD
Q: Could you tell me a little bit about your initial experience as a community college student in the SERCCS program at CLASSE?
Q: Could you tell me a little bit about your initial experience as a community college student in the SERCCS program at CLASSE?
Just as space holds infinite mysteries, when we zoom in at the level of biomolecules (one trillion times smaller than a meter), there is still so much to learn.
Summer Engineering Research for Community College Students (SERCCS) selects 4-5 students from (2-year) community colleges for eight-week internships in accelerator and x-ray sciences research, during which students also attend/lead formal seminars, tour research facilities, and enjoy social and recreational events.
PyMOL is a popular molecular visualization software used by scientists and researchers to visualize and analyze molecular structures. It is designed to work with a variety of file formats, including PDB (Protein Data Bank) files, and can display a range of molecular properties, such as protein linkage, electrostatic interactions and hydrogen bonding.
The development, outlined in a paper published March 3 in Nature Communications, provides researchers with the tools to interpret the once-discarded data from X-ray crystallography experiments – an essential method used to study the structures of proteins. This work, which builds on a study released in 2020, could lead to a better understanding of a protein’s movement, structure and overall function.
What is the discovery?
Steve is very interested in structural biology methods that let us see "molecular movies" -- i.e. how molecular machines like enzymes actually work. Diffuse scattering is one such method that he’s worked on with Nozomi Ando's group. But he’s also interested in using time-resolved techniques to include more types of perturbations, such as temperature, pressure, and electric fields.