News

The organelle can arrange itself in a sheet or a shell — but that doesn’t change how it operates

Award will support the Vermaas lab’s work in drug discovery through molecular dynamics research in plants. 

A group of graduate and undergraduate students participated in the 2024 EnergyTech University Prize, making it to the regionals portion of the competition. The contest is organized by the U.S. Department of Energy Office of Technology Transitions and challenges students to create and present a business plan in the energy sector.

Using molecular dynamics, researchers from the Kramer and Vermaas labs showed how electrons move through a crystal, jumping from heme to heme. The researchers found that the rate at which the electrons jump from one heme to another highly depended on the temperature of the crystal.

Researchers from the PRL Vermaas lab participated in Girls' Math and Science Day, an event designed to encourage young girls to pursue scientific interests.

For a small field like computational biology, joining an international workshop is a once in a lifetime opportunity to learn from, collaborate with and talk to professionals and students from around the world. This is how Duncan Boren of the Vermaas Lab felt when he learned about the CompBioAsia program.

The movement of electrons across wires is what allows us to use electricity every day. Biological nanowires, microscopic wires made of proteins, have caught researchers’ attention for their ability to carry electrons over long distances. In a recent study published in Small by the Vermaas lab at the PRL, researchers expand our understanding of biological nanowires through the use of computer simulations.

Environmental factors like temperature play a large role in how well a plant will grow and if it reaches its full potential. Using computer simulations, two lab groups at the MSU-DOE Plant Research Laboratory teamed up to investigate how isoprene levels and temperature affect the thylakoid membrane of plants at the nanoscale.

Three groups from the MSU-DOE Plant Research Laboratory participated in the 2023 MSU Science Festival. The Community Building and Outreach Committee, the Vermaas lab and the Sharkey lab volunteered to bring PRL science to the public at the university’s annual festival.

Researchers from the Vermaas lab created a more efficient tool to solve the problem of ring piercings in molecular simulations. This work is published in Biomolecules.

With nearly $11M from DOE, MSU is leading a collaboration to usher the US into new frontiers of clean energy with inspiration from microbes.

Daipayan Sarkar is a postdoctoral researcher from the Vermaas lab, where his research focus is on fundamental aspects of photosynthesis and its widespread application in sustainability research.

New research from the Vermaas lab with the objective to determine how molecular chaperones may regulate amyloid fibril formation, potentially by interacting with the N17 or PRD regions within HTTExon1.

IMPACTS - Integrated training Model in Plant And Compu-Tational Sciences – is a program funded by the National Science Foundation designed to train doctoral students in advanced computational/data science approaches that can be applied to the field of plant biology. The program provides mentorship and funding to the students selected.

The annual forum provides students with an opportunity to showcase their scholarship and creative activity. Held each spring, the University Undergraduate Research and Arts Forum (UURAF) brings together an intellectual community of highly motivated students to share their work with faculty, staff, peers and external audiences and receive constructive feedback from judges.

Integrating single particle cryo-electron microscopy (EM) and molecular dynamics (MD) has made a paradigm shift to the field of structural biology in order to determine both structure and function of biomolecules.

An international team of scientists, including Michigan State University researchers, believe they may have found a molecular mechanism behind the extremely rare blood clots linked to adenovirus COVID-19 vaccines.

Two undergraduate students from Dr. Josh Vermaas’s lab have been awarded funding for their computational research this fall.

Josh Vermaas, the newest addition to the MSU-DOE Plant Research Laboratory faculty body, has begun his assistant professorship this month. Josh is a computational biophysicist whose research interests include developing computational models to better understand membrane processes and plant materials.