LEONID MIRNY, Assistant
Professor of Health Sciences & Technology and Physics
Research Interests
Professor Mirny's research focuses on computational
structural and system biology. His multidisciplinary approach combines
first-principle physics with the analysis of biological systems
such as genes, proteins, and metabolic pathways. His efforts in
computational structural biology involve the development of novel
computational tools to analyze and predict structures of proteins,
their complexes, and protein-DNA interactions. In these studies,
Prof. Mirny seeks to identify amino acids that determine specific
DNA recognition, to test these predictions in future experiments,
and to find methods to engineer proteins with novel biological functions.
Professor Mirny's system biology projects,
which involve the design and simulation of genetic and biochemical
networks, integrate large-scale analysis of proteomic and genomic
data with molecular simulations of proteins. He is interested in
developing stochastic computational models of genetic and biochemical
networks, cellular regulation, and signal transduction. Professor
Mirny's research seeks to extract efficiently biological knowledge
from experimental genomic and proteomic data and to develop a fundamental
understanding of the molecular mechanisms involved in cellular regulation.
This work aims to reconstruct the cell's entire regulatory network-a
goal of both genomics and bioinformatics research.
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Biographical Sketch
A researcher in biophysics and computational
biology, Prof. Leonid Mirny has taught HST.558 (Introduction to
Modeling and Simulation), and has served on HST's Ph.D. Admissions
Committee. Following his appointment to the MIT faculty in 2001,
he taught Statistical Physics in Biology (8.398). A 1998 Harvard
University graduate with a Ph.D. in Biophysics, Prof. Mirny was
a Junior Fellow at the Harvard Society of Fellows. He attended the
Weizmann Institute of Science (Msc'94, Chemistry) and the Moscow
Engineering Physics Institute (Dip'92, Physics).
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Selected Publications
Mirny, L.A. and Gelfand M.S. "Using orthologous and paralogous
proteins to identify specificity determining residues." J.
Mol. Biol. 231:7-20 (2002).
Mirny, L.A. and Gelfand, M.S. "Structural analysis of conserved
base pairs in protein-DNA complexes." Nucl. Acids. Res. 30:1704-1711
(2002).
Mirny, L.A. and Shakhnovich, E.I. "Protein Folding Theory:
From Lattice to All-Atom Models." Ann. Rev. Biophys. Biomol.
Struct. 30:361-396 (2001).
Mirny, L.A. and Shakhnovich, E.I "Evolutionary conservation
of the folding nucleus." J. Mol. Biol. 308:123-129 (2001).
Mirny, L.A., Finkelstein, A., and Shakhnovich, E. "Statistical
Significance of Protein Structure Prediction by Threading."
Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. August 22, 2000.
Li, L., Mirny, L.A. and Shakhnovich, E.I. "Kinetics, thermodynamics
and evolution of non-native interactions in protein folding nucleus."
Nature Structural Biol. (4):336-42 (2000).
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