Bioexcel webinar: Driving forces in biomolecular condensates from atomistic simulations of model peptides

Date: May 12th, 2026, 15:00 CEST / 16:00 EEST

Short peptides have been instrumental as models for more complex systems. Studying short peptides, we have gained understanding of fundamental folding events like alpha helix nucleation or hairpin folding, and in the determination of the microscopic origin of internal friction. Short peptides are also challenging tests for the calibration of modern force fields, and hence have been extensively used in recent optimization efforts. In my talk I will focus on our recent work on phase separation in our laboratory. Using peptide models, we test the hypothesis that phase separation is an emergent property determined by composition, even in the absence of a polypeptide chain, multivalency and patterning effects. For this, we use atomistic molecular dynamics (MD) simulations of saturated solutions of individual amino acids and mixtures thereof in stoichiometries comparable to those of phase-separating low com-plexity domains. Additionally, we disentangle the hierarchy of interaction strength between the two most dominant types of aromatic and positively charged residues in condensates. Our results are broadly consistent with trends observed in experiments and in atomistic simulations of full-length IDPs and reconcile findings from decades of work in physical chemistry and protein biophysics.

Speakers: David de Sancho

Duration: 1 Hour

Webinar will be hosted on ZOOM (install the latest Zoom application before the webinar)