An overview of the Sandia national laboratories genomes to life project, "carbon sequestration in Synechococcus sp.: from molecular machines to hierarchical modeling"

Abstract

The Sandia-led Genomes to Life (GTL) project: Carbon Sequestration in Synechococcus Sp.: From Molecular Machines to Hierarchical Modeling, is focused on developing, prototyping, and applying new computational tools and methods to ellucidate the biochemical mechanisms of the carbon sequestration of Synechococcus Sp., an abundant marine cyanobacteria known to play an important role in the global carbon cycle. Our effort includes five subprojects: an experimental investigation, three computational biology efforts, and a fifth which deals with addressing computational infrastructure challenges of relevance to this project and the genomes to life program as a whole. Our experimental effort is designed to provide biology and data to drive the computational efforts and includes significant investment in developing new experimental methods for uncovering protein partners, characterizing protein complexes, identifying new binding domains. Our computational efforts include coupling molecular simulation methods with knowledge discovery from diverse biological data sets for high-throughput discovery and characterization of protein-protein complexes and developing a set of novel capabilities for inference of regulatory pathways in microbial genomes across multiple sources of information through the integration of computational and experimental technologies.