
Robert Jernigan
- Charles F. Curtiss Distinguished Professor
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Contact Info
Education
- B.S., Chemistry, California Institute of Technology, 1963
- Ph.D., Physical Chemistry, Stanford University, 1968
- Postdoctoral Fellow, University of California,San Diego 1970
Interdepartmental Programs
His research career has focused primarily on molecular studies, ranging broadly from small drug molecules to proteins, and most recently to larger molecular assemblages. His early analyses of protein structures yielded the Miyazawa-Jernigan contact potentials. He pioneered the application of elastic networks to compute functional protein motions, showed that these models yield important information about the slow, large-scale domain motions of proteins, that these motions depend mostly on the overall shapes, and that these models indicate what are the largest, most important motions of proteins. These domain motions relate closely to protein mechanisms, as he showed for reverse transcriptase, the ribosome and other protein structures. He has worked extensively on datamining from protein structures, to derive interaction information, contact energies and entropies, and structural information to improve sequence matching. He demonstrated that representing interactions between collective groups of atoms in proteins is a more effective way to represent their interactions than is the use of atomic interactions. He has a long-standing interest in using molecular computations to aid in interpreting experiments, recently for single molecule experiments on cell adhesion. Recent focus has been on using large protein language models to infer function and other protein behaviors from sequences. This is leading to better ways to understand mutations and to distinguish the most important ones.
Area of Expertise:
- Structural Bioinformatics
- Computational Biology
- Sequence Analyses
- Datamining
- Molecular Mechanisms
- Molecular Dynamics
- Protein/Gene Functions