QBioS Hands-on Workshop 2024

On May 14-15, 2024, the annual Hands-On Workshop was hosted by Quantitative Biosciences first year PhD students, along with the InQuBATE cohort. The workshop topic was, “Hands on Protein Modeling Using AlphaFold2.” The team was led by Professor J.C. Gumbart and postdoc Katie Kuo. Keynote speakers included Professors Andrew McShan (School of Chemistry and Biochemistry) and Jeffrey Skolnick (School of Biological Sciences).

This year’s workshop hosted 55 guests, most coming from colleges and universities in the Atlanta area, including upper-level undergraduate students, graduate students, scientists and faculty, all interested in learning how to integrate computational models of protein structures into their research. The content of the workshop consisted of first exploring the use of PyMOL, a protein structure visualization tool, followed by the exploration of AlphaFold2 to predict protein structures and even a section including AlphaFold3 which was just released a week prior.

Lecture topics:
Professor Andrew McShan on “The coming of age of de novo protein design,” and Professor Jeffrey Skolnick on “Predicting protein interactions of the kinase Lck critical to T cell modulation”.

By the end of the workshop, participants centered a competition, each creating an amino acid sequence of their own and then predicting its structure using the tools and approaches they had just learned. Participants competed in (1) predicting alpha helices; (2) predicting beta sheets; and (3) making the most compact proteins.

According to first-year PhD QBioS student and workshop organizer, Luis Felipe Cedeno Perez, "We were impressed with the engagement of the participants in the topic. They arrived early and were working all day to get the most out of the workshop. We worked hard throughout the semester to organize the workshop and prepare the material which made it really fulfilling hearing that they really enjoyed the workshop and that some of them are planning on using these tools in their research."

Agenda details may be found at this link: https://sites.gatech.edu/qbios-workshop2024/schedule/