MCB Seminar Series: Dr. Juan R. Perilla, Assistant Professor, University of Delaware
Host: Eric May
"Deciphering the role of cellular metabolites in the life-cycle of HIV-1"
Summary: In this talk I will show our work establishing the role of inositol hexakiphosphates and nucleotides during the life cycle of HIV-1. Our approach combines structural biology, computational modeling and virological assays
Dr. Perilla is a biophysical chemist, currently an Assistant Professor of Chemistry & Biochemistry at the University of Delaware. He obtained his Ph.D. in 2011 at the Johns Hopkins University, researching transition state theory applied to large conformational changes in proteins. He then moved to the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (Prof. Klaus Schulten's group), where he studied entire viruses and bacterial organelles under physiological conditions. Prof. Perilla develops physical and chemical based methodologies for the understanding of biological process related to life and disease. In particular, his research spans from quantum-mechanical calculations to mesoscale simulations and leverages the computational power of petascale and exascale super computers. Prof. Perilla has conducted the largest simulations ever performed, which allowed him to develop a robust statistical analysis framework for such big datasets. He has authored ~50 peer-reviewed articles, 11 journal covers and three book chapters. Dr. Perilla enjoys sports like squash, golf, long-distance road cycling, as well as playing chess and the violin.
To learn more about Dr. Perilla and his research, visit
https://journals.plos.org/plosbiology/article?id=10.1371/journal.pbio.3001015https://biophysics.chem.udel.edu/