CCB Brown Bag Seminar

SPEAKERS:

Lisa M. Brown, Ph.D., Senior Data Scientist, Developmental Dynamics

IMAGE GENERATION TECHNOLOGY FOR DOMAIN TRANSFER AND SUPER-RESOLUTION IN MICROSCOPY: I will give a short update on our work in lineage construction and  our results across different organisms, tracked objects and sensors.  This will set the stage for future work needed to address issues in domain transfer,  isotropic restoration, and supervision via simulations. I will then discuss  the recent trends in image generation and image-to-image translation.  I will describe how some of this exciting work in generative adversarial networks, variational autoencoders, and autoregressive modeling can be used not only to generate realistic images without supervision, but to address the issues we are facing in biology to fine-tune models trained on data from different domains and to perform isotropic super-resolution for volumetric fluorescence microscopy.

Sonya Hanson, Ph.D., Research Scientist, Structural & Molecular Biophysics

ON THE IMPORTANCE OF MOLECULES IN BIOLOGY, AND WHERE WE STILL FALL SHORT: Even with a wealth of high-resolution structures of biomolecules from experiment (and even high-quality models now generated from machine learning), understanding how these molecules function in the context of their environment remains non-trivial. Experimental and computational methods to capture the relevant thermodynamics and kinetics of these processes are improving, but when a change in protonation state or a seemingly innocuous mutation will completely change a protein’s properties remains difficult to predict. Here I discuss some recent vignettes that illustrate this, and pontificate on how these open problems should drive the focus of methods development in computational structural biology.