Jonathan (Peiyu) Wang Named Semifinalist in 2007 Intel Science Talent Search
Jonathan (Peiyu) Wang, a senior from the Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology, has been named semifinalist in 2007 Intel Science Talent Search. 300 semifinalists have been selected among 1705 entrants from 46 states, DC, Puerto Rico, and five overseas schools. For this contest Peiyu Wang has been mentored by Assistant Professor Dmitri Klimov from the Department of Bioinformatics and Computational Biology. Using Monte Carlo simulations and lattice protein models they studied cotranslational folding of proteins. In contrast to "traditional" in vitro refolding cotranslational folding occurs in vivo and is not well understood. In their simulations Wang and Klimov have shown that the mechanisms of cotranslational folding for small single domain proteins are expected to differ considerably from those observed in refolding. They explain this difference by quasi-equilibrium accumulation of nascent native structure during biosynthesis on a ribosome.