Dr. Padmini Rangamani (UCSD)

Abstract

Membrane bending is ubiquitous in many cellular phenomena. Over the past couple of decades, biochemical reconstitution experiments have revealed that a variety of membrane-protein interactions can lead to curvature generation. To gain physical insights into how the mechanics and energetics of different membrane bending mechanisms can impact biological processes, mathematical and computational models of membrane bending have been developed. In the past few years, we have developed many models of membrane bending as influenced by membrane-protein interactions. Ongoing developments include linking coarse-grained molecular dynamic simulations with continuum descriptions of the lipid bilayer taking into account the interplay between protein diffusion and membrane bending. In this work, I will discuss these models, insights gained from them, and possible solutions for integrating different modeling approaches. The predictive utility of these models will be discussed in the context of experimental observations and implications for understanding the physics of remodeling and reshaping membranes. Finally, I will also introduce our recent efforts on modeling membrane-actin interactions and how these can be adapted to obtain insights in clathrin-mediated endocytosis.

About the speaker

Padmini Rangamani is an associate professor in Mechanical Engineering at the University of California, San Diego. She joined the department in July 2014. Earlier, she was a UC Berkeley Chancellor’s Postdoctoral Fellow, where she worked on lipid bilayer mechanics. She obtained her Ph.D. in biological sciences from the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. She received her B.S. and M.S. in Chemical Engineering from Osmania University (Hyderabad, India) and Georgia Institute of Technology respectively. She is the recipient of the PECASE, ARO, AFOSR, and ONR Young Investigator Awards, and a Sloan Research Fellowship for Computational and Molecular Evolutionary Biology. She is also the lead PI for a MURI award on Bioinspired low energy information processing from the AFOSR.

Website: https://sites.google.com/eng.ucsd.edu/prangamani/home