Jan Forsman
Principal Investigator
Professor Jan Forsman works at the the Division of Computational Chemistry at Lund University. His primary research topic is statistical thermodynamical research.
Project in first call:
Many-body interactions in crowded biological systems
Principal Investigator
Professor Jan Forsman works at the the Division of Computational Chemistry at Lund University. His primary research topic is statistical thermodynamical research.
Project in first call:
Many-body interactions in crowded biological systems
Principal Investigator
Professor Jan Forsman works at the the Division of Computational Chemistry at Lund University. His primary research topic is statistical thermodynamical research.
Project in first call:
Many-body interactions in crowded biological systems
Short Biography
Jan Forsman was appointed office director and professor at the Division of Computational Chemistry, Lund University, in 2015. His research interests include developments of approximate statistical mechanical theories, with an emphasis on classical density functional theories, and applications to various areas of Soft Matter Science, such as colloidal dispersions, polymer solutions, surface forces, adsorption, phase equilibria, and ionic liquids.
AMBER postdoctoral fellowship subject (first call)
Many-body interactions in crowded biological systems
We have developed a mean-field theory to treat mixtures of nanoparticles imbedded in polymer solutions, where the polymers for instance may be intrinsically disordered proteins. The theory is based on a many-body polymer-mediated potential of mean force between the particles and remains accurate even in the so-called "protein regime", where the particles’ diameters cannot be considered small compared to the polymer radius of gyration. We have already used the theory to calculate phase diagrams for a binary mixture of unequal-sized particles, both adsorbing and non-adsorbing. The aim of the new project is to utilise the theory to predict interactions and phase behaviours in crowded environments, such as (models of) a biological cell.
It should be emphasised that the oft-used approach assuming pairwise-additive potentials of mean force produce quantitatively, and sometimes qualitatively, different phase diagrams. We hope to verify our theoretical predictions with data from SAXS experiments on crowded model systems, in which interactions are mediated either by synthetic model polymers or existing intrinsically disordered proteins. The theoretical predictions will be compared with experimental data, where the new BioSAXS instrument at KILU will be used.
Location: Lund, Sweden
Organisation: Lund University, Department of Chemistry, Division of Computational Chemistry
Links
AMBER call in EURAXESS main call (starting point for application)
Jan Forsman's profile in Lund University Research portal
Division of Computational Chemistry's profile in Lund University Research portal