Molecules in Motion
Video games transport players into richly imagined alternate worlds rendered by graphics processing units, GPUs, within game controllers. Chemists have begun using arrays of these same GPUs to explore another world, this one real: the motion of molecules as they interact with each other and their environment. Jamie Schiffer, a graduate student in chemistry and biochemistry at UC San Diego, used this approach to follow the motion of two proteins that influence how much energy is available at the surface of heart muscle cells, work that earned her the NVIDIA GPU Award for best GPU poster at the national meeting of the American Chemical Society in Denver this spring. Schiffer explains in this video how using fast graphical computing to follow the motion of molecules, atom-by-atom, could help find a drug to protect failing hearts. Photo by Erik Jepsen/UC San Diego Publications Watch Video »
