Ignacia Echeverria Riesco, PhD
My research is focused on building integrative, computational, and theoretical models to describe the structure and dynamics of proteins, nucleic acids, and carbohydrates to understand their function and evolution. My scientific background is molecular biophysics, computational modeling, and statistical physics. My research experience is computational structural biology, biophysics, and integrative structure determination of macromolecular assemblies. I have developed methods for integrative structure determination, molecular dynamics (MD) simulations, free energy calculations, and coarse-graining.
I have applied these methods to a variety of biological problems, such as (1) structure determination of host-pathogen macromolecular complexes, with emphasis is HIV (Kaake*, Echeverria* et al. MCP 2021), (2) structure determination of large protein assemblies using integrative methods, including the Nuclear Pore Complex (Akey*, Singh*, Ouch*, Echeverria* et al. Cell 2022), (3) converting genetic interactions data into structural models (Braberg*, Echeverria* et al. Science 2020), (4) characterization of the dynamics of unfolded proteins and (5) the effects of post-translational modifications, and (6) free energy calculations of protein folding, protein-DNA, and protein-carbohydrate interactions.