Marcos Sotomayor

Research Description:

Mechanical forces produced by sound, gravity, and osmotic pressure are sensed by different organisms through multiple mechanisms that usually involve mechanosensitive ion channels and accessory proteins conveying tension. We are using a combination of X-ray crystallography and computational biology to determine the structure and dynamics of macromolecular complexes involved in vertebrate mechanotransduction. We are particularly interested in structures of cadherins and membrane proteins and ion channels involved in sound perception, as well as in large-scale all-atom molecular dynamics simulations of force transduction.