K-State chemist receives NIH grant for research on ion atmospheres in biological systems
Monday, Jan. 8, 2024
MANHATTAN — Kansas State University chemists are developing a better strategy for studying ion atmospheres, which play a critical role in modulating interactions between biomolecules like proteins, DNA, RNA and lipids.
Paul Smith, professor of chemistry in the College of Arts and Sciences, has received a $1.1 million grant from the National Institutes of Health for the study "Theory and Simulation of Local Electroneutrality and Ion Atmospheres in Biological Systems."
Elizabeth Ploetz, a postdoctoral research associate in Smith's laboratory, helped secure the funding.
According to Smith, experimental studies aimed at probing the details of ion atmospheres around electrically charged biomolecules are complicated by the fact that the ions are only weakly bound to the biomolecules.
Smith's research team uses an innovative combination of local electroneutrality relationships and a rigorous and exact theory of solutions to provide a new view of the ion distributions in solution. They then confirm the predicted results using molecular simulation.
This work can help decipher existing data on charged protein-protein interactions involved in various mechanisms underlying physiology and pathophysiology. This is important to human health and the biotechnology industry as well as research on non-biological ion atmospheres.
