Entropy and Free Energy in Structural Biology (PDF)

Hagai Meirovitch is professor Emeritus in the Department of Computational and Systems Biology at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine. He earned an MSc degree in nuclear physics from the Hebrew University, a PhD degree in chemical physics from the Weizmann Institute, and conducted postdoctoral training in the laboratory of Professor Harold A. Scheraga at Cornell University. His research focused on developing computer simulation methodologies within the scope of statistical mechanics, as highlighted below. He devised novel methods for extracting the absolute entropy from Monte Carlo samples and techniques for generating polymer chains, which were used to study phase transitions in polymers, magnetic, and lattice gas systems. These methods, together with conformational search techniques for proteins, led to a free energy-based approach for treating molecular flexibility. This approach was used to analyze NMR relaxation data from cyclic peptides and to study structural preferences of surface loops in bound and free enzymes. He developed a new methodology for calculating the free energy of ligand/protein binding, which unlike standard techniques, provides the decrease in the ligand's entropy upon binding. Dr Meirovitch conducted part of the research depicted above, and other studies, at the Supercomputer Computations Research Institute of the Florida State University, Tallahassee.