Molecular Graphics with Blaine Mooers

Dr. Blaine Mooers is an associate professor of biochemistry and molecular biology in the College of Medicine at the University of Oklahoma Health Sciences Center (OUHSC) in Oklahoma City. He earned his PhD in biochemistry and biophysics from Oregon State University in 1997. He was a Howard Hughes Medical Institute postdoctoral fellow at the University of Oregon. He has been a faculty member at OUHSC since 2006. His lab works on the structural basis of RNA editing in trypanosomes. This system is unique and has attracted interest as a drug target. His main experimental method is X-ray protein crystallography. Blaine is a heavy user of synchrotron radiation facilities at national laboratories. He also uses supercomputers in his work. The end product of his work is the molecular structure of a protein that can be further analyzed for drug development.

The main tool for visualizing the structures of proteins is computer-aided molecular graphics. One of the most popular molecular graphics programs is PyMOL because it can make publication quality figures. PyMOL is also used to make movies of protein molecules in motion. The appearance of images made by PyMOL can be controlled to a high level of detail via scripts in the PyMOL command language or via Python scripts. The writing of scripts is a difficult habit for many users of PyMOL to adopt. Blaine will talk about a series of tools written in Python that he has developed to help students master the writing of scripts.

The meetup will start at 11:30, but come a few minutes early to meet other Python developers, dabblers, hobbyists, and learners! Between meetups, you can chat with us in the #pythonista channel in Techlahoma's Slack. Get more information at https://www.techlahoma.org/spaces and sign up at http://slack.techlahoma.org/

Techlahoma provides food and drinks for our meetups. If you have any dietary restrictions, please notify the group organizers, and we'll do our best to accommodate them!

StarSpace46 parking:
https://static1.squarespace.com/static/57422f09ab48dec01e5e20c7/t/588fb33ee3df2828e8ceb5ab/1485814862865/ss46parking

You can park in the lot on the southwest corner of Sheridan and Klein. Enter through the wooden gate on the west side of the building, then go across the patio to the Techlahoma Event Space door.