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Zaida (Zan) Luthey-Schulten

Profile picture for Zaida (Zan)  Luthey-Schulten

Contact Information

Assistant: Lisa Johnson
lisa3@illinois.edu
(217) 300-9574

Department of Chemistry
University of Illinois
A544 CLSL, Box 19-6
600 South Mathews Avenue
Urbana, IL 61801
Murchison-Mallory Endowed Chair in Chemistry

Biography

Professor Schulten received a B.S. in Chemistry from the University of Southern California in 1969, a M.S. in Chemistry from Harvard University in 1972, and a Ph.D. in Applied Mathematics from Harvard University in 1975. From 1975 to 1980 she was a Research Fellow at the Max-Planck Institute for Biophysical Chemistry in Goettingen, and from 1980 to 1985 a Research Fellow in the Department of Theoretical Physics at the Technical University of Munich.

Research Interests

Determining the rules of life for a minimal bacteria cell

GPU-based simulations of stochastic/deterministic processes in bacterial and eukaryal cells at biologically relevant length, time, and concentration scales

computational studies of biomolecular energy landscapes to explore the evolution of structure, folding and function; statistical methods of protein folding - thermodynamics and kinetics; design of optimized energy functions for protein structure prediction; structural genomics of metabolic pathways.

Research Description

Research: From Molecules to Cells - Whole Cell Simulations of Bacterial and Eukaryal Organisms, Rules of Life for a Minimal Cell,  Energy Landscapes of Biological Molecules, Exploring the Evolution of Structure, Function & Folding

Lattice Microbes software for simulating hybrid stochastic-deterministic  dynamics of cellular processes

Essential networks of a minimal cell

Origins of life, Evolution of translation, Physical bioinformatics

VMD/Multiple Alignment: Evolutionary Analysis Tool

Prediction of protein structure and function with QR profiles

Docking with steered molecular dynamics (SMD)

Protein folding: hybrid molecular dynamics

Awards and Honors

Murchison-Mallory Professor of Chemistry 2019
Fellow, Biophysical Society 2019
Fellow, Advanced Studies Institute, LMU Munich 2014
Fellow, American Physical Society, 2000
Fellow, Advanced Studies Institute, Hebrew University, Israel, 1998

Honors & Awards

Murchison-Mallory Professor of Chemistry 2019
Fellow, Biophysical Society 2019
Fellow, Advanced Studies Institute, LMU Munich 2014
Fellow, American Physical Society, 2000
Fellow, Advanced Studies Institute, Hebrew University, Israel, 1998

Recent Publications

Gilbert, B. R., & Luthey-Schulten, Z. (2024). Replicating Chromosomes in Whole-Cell Models of Bacteria. In Methods in Molecular Biology (pp. 625-653). (Methods in Molecular Biology; Vol. 2819). Humana Press Inc.. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-0716-3930-6_29

Gilbert, B. R., Thornburg, Z. R., Brier, T. A., Stevens, J. A., Grünewald, F., Stone, J. E., Marrink, S. J., & Luthey-Schulten, Z. (2023). Dynamics of chromosome organization in a minimal bacterial cell. Frontiers in Cell and Developmental Biology, 11, Article 1214962. https://doi.org/10.3389/fcell.2023.1214962

Stevens, J. A., Grünewald, F., van Tilburg, P. A. M., König, M., Gilbert, B. R., Brier, T. A., Thornburg, Z. R., Luthey-Schulten, Z., & Marrink, S. J. (2023). Molecular dynamics simulation of an entire cell. Frontiers in Chemistry, 11, Article 1106495. https://doi.org/10.3389/fchem.2023.1106495

Bianchi, D. M., Pelletier, J. F., Hutchison, C. A., Glass, J. I., & Luthey-Schulten, Z. (2022). Toward the Complete Functional Characterization of a Minimal Bacterial Proteome. Journal of Physical Chemistry B, 126(36), 6820-6834. https://doi.org/10.1021/acs.jpcb.2c04188

Haas, D., Thamm, A. M., Sun, J., Huang, L., Sun, L., Beaudoin, G. A. W., Wise, K. S., Lerma-Ortiz, C., Bruner, S. D., Breuer, M., Luthey-Schulten, Z., Lin, J., Wilson, M. A., Brown, G., Yakunin, A. F., Kurilyak, I., Folz, J., Fiehn, O., Glass, J. I., ... de Crécy-Lagard, V. (2022). Metabolite Damage and Damage Control in a Minimal Genome. mBio, 13(4). https://doi.org/10.1128/mbio.01630-22

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