Welcome to the Protein Electrostatics meeting in Belgrade, June 25-28 2018
The PROTEIN ELECTROSTATICS meeting in Belgrade is a continuation of meetings held in Lisbon (2014) and Berlin (2016) and of the Protein Electrostatics workshop organized in Telluride on alternative years. The goal of this meeting is to bring theorists and experimentalists together to discuss the progress, problems and issues that need to be addressed, to generate new ideas and to forge new collaborations.
Electrostatics affects almost every structural and functional aspect of proteins, including stability, solubility, dynamics, interactions, and catalysis. It is especially important for key processes involving movement of charges, including proton and electron transfer reactions and transport of ions.
Theoretical and computational understanding of electrostatics in proteins is a challenge as proteins are complex. Structural relaxation in response to changes in charged state is turning out to be important, and it might occur over timescales that are still out of reach of classical simulation methods. It is also not clear how appropriate classical force fields will be to describe environments where electronic polarization effects are important. Multi-scale methods, ranging from quantum to classical to continuum or coarse grained might be needed. Additional experiments will be needed to identify the physical chemistry that needs to be captured computationally, and to produce the data sets necessary for critical benchmarking of computational methods and to guide their improvement and development.