Gül Zerze
University of Houston, TX·Engineering·Early-career
When large molecules such as proteins crowd together in a solution, they can separate into droplet-like, liquid condensed phases, much as oil beads up in water. This grouping matters for making medicines, preserving food and building self-healing materials.
- Fields
Engineering
Chemistry
Biophysics
- Topics
biomolecular condensates
liquid-liquid phase separation
nucleation
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Jan 2030
What they work on
- Identify the role of mesoscale clusters, small intermediate molecular groupings, in nonclassical nucleation of liquid-like condensates, using free energy methods to map their stability and find metastable states.
- Quantify how the molecular composition of a solution changes the free energy barrier to nucleating a condensed droplet, using advanced Monte Carlo simulations.
- Determine what controls the long-timescale growth, merging and dissolution of condensates, using dynamical density functional theory, a continuum model that connects molecular simulations to large-scale behavior.
More about the research
Similar droplets also form inside cells, where they are linked to aging and disease. Yet the first steps of how these droplets form, and what keeps them stable, are poorly understood, which limits efforts to control them.
Why it matters
Knowing how liquid-like molecular droplets form and persist could help researchers control them in practice. The grant names drug delivery systems, food preservation and self-healing materials as uses. Because similar condensates form inside cells and are linked to aging and disease, the mechanisms found here may also help explain how these cellular structures behave.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Marcelo Kuroda
Auburn University, AL·Materials Science
Engage ten undergraduates per summer in ten-week computational projects that model materials and molecules across length and time scales, from electronic-structure theory to continuum modeling.
John Straub
Boston University, MA·Biophysics
Identify factors that govern liquid-liquid phase separation and later amyloid aggregation of the disordered proteins tau and alpha-synuclein, combining experiments with computer simulations.
Scott Milner
Pennsylvania State University, PA·Engineering
Develop an integrated method combining constant-potential density functional theory (DFT) and classical molecular dynamics with a full electrochemical double layer to predict activation barriers of proton-electron transfer steps at electrodes.
The school
University of Houston: 21 labs on PI Pages, $239M a year on research, 374 research doctorates a year.
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