Dr Sergei Krivov

Sergei Krivov is a RCUK Academic Research Fellow in the Instuitute of Molecular and Cellular Biology at the University of Leeds. He obtained his his PhD in Physics in 1999 from the Novosibirsk State University Russia in 1996. From 2001 to 2008 he was a postdoctoral researcher in Martin Karplus laboratory in Strasbourg. He joined Leeds University in 2008.

Research Areas: Protein folding, free energy landscapes, computational biology and biophysics.

My research focuses on developing algorithms for rigorous, quantitative analysis of dynamics of complex systems by determining the underlying free energy landscapes. Many biological systems exhibit complex dynamics. To understand such dynamics with many degrees of freedom, one often projects it onto one or several collective variables (so-called reaction coordinates). Protein folding, the complex, concerted motion of a protein chain towards a unique three-dimensional structure, is the prominent example of where such reduction of complexity is useful. The folding dynamics is described then in a simple way as diffusion on the free energy landscape associated with the coordinate, so one can determine the free energy barrier or the structure of the transition state. For such description to be quantitatively accurate the reaction coordinate should be chosen in an optimal way. The developed framework is generic and is used to obtain simple yet accurate description of many important complex phenomena, for example, the game of chess or the patient recovery dynamics after kidney transplant.