RESEARCH HIGHLIGHTS

Making use of molecular dynamics and Brownian dynamics, we are investigating various nanotubes as artificial ion channels. The main purpose of this research is to reproduce the physiological attributes of the gramicidin pore.
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Potassium Channel Using the recently unveiled structure of the potassium channel we employ a combination of electrostatics, Brownian dynamics and molecular dynamics to investigate the way in which this biological channel discriminates between potassium and sodium ions, and reproduce some physiological attributes of conduction.
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THE BIOPHYSICS GROUP

The Biophysics Group (formerly the Protein Dynamics Unit) is interested in the permeation of ions through biological membrane channels such as potassium, calcium, sodium and gramicidin chanels. We use various theoretical and computational tools such as Molecular dynamics and Brownian dynamics to gain a physical insight into the permeation processes.


LATEST PUBLICATIONS

  • Tamsyn A. Hilder, Dan Gordon and Shin-Ho Chung.  Computational modeling of transport in synthetic nanotubes: a review.  Nanomedicine: Nanotechnology, Biology, and Medicine, (in press, 2011).
    PDF: full article
  • Tamsyn A. Hilder, and Shin-Ho Chung.  Carbon nanotube as a gramacidin analogue.  The Journal of Chemical Physics, 501, 423-426, 2011.
    PDF: full article
  • Tamsyn A. Hilder, Dan Gordon and Shin-Ho Chung.  Synthetic cation-selective nanotube: permeant cations chaperoned by anions.  Chemical Physics Letters, 133, 000000-1 - 000000-7, 2010.
    PDF: full article
  • Tamsyn A. Hilder, Dan Gordon and Shin-Ho Chung.  Synthetic chloride-selective carbon nanotubes examined using molecular and stochastic dynamics.  Biophysical Journal 99, 1734-1742, 2010.
    PDF: full article
  • Tamsyn A. Hilder, Rui Yang, V. Ganesh, Dan Gordon, Andrey Bliznyuk, Alistair P. Rendell and Shin-Ho Chung.  Validity of current force fields for simulations on boron nitride nanotubes.  Micro & Nano Letters 5, 150-156, 2010.
    PDF: full article
  • Dan Gordon, Matthew Hoyles and Shin-Ho Chung.  An algorithm for rigid-body Brownian dynamics.  Physical Review E 80, 066703-1 - 066703-12, 2009.
    PDF: full article

PRESS RELEASES

Nanotubes help to solve desalination problem

Monday 24 August 2009

A team of researchers from The Australian National University have discovered a way to remove salt from seawater using nanotubes made from boron and nitrogen atoms that will make the process up to five times faster.

With 25 percent of the world's population currently affected by water shortages, researchers Dr Tamsyn Hilder, Dr Dan Gordon and group leader Professor Shin-Ho Chung from the Computational Biophysics Group at the Research School of Biology at ANU have come up with a way to eliminate all salt from seawater ... (Read more)