Syma Khalid
University of Oxford
Editor, Computational Biophysics
Biophysical Journal
What are you currently working on that excites you?
I am really excited about our collaborative work on trying to answer the question of what does the surface of Gram-negative bacteria look like. Bacteria are far simpler organisms than humans, but despite many decades of study, it turns out that we still do not know how the surface of bacteria is organized. It is important that we do so, from both a fundamental microbiology/biophysics perspective and the perspective of facilitating the rational development of new antibiotics—the latter because antibiotics have to either disrupt the bacterial surface or penetrate it to move into the cell to disrupt some intracellular process, but in either case, interaction with the surface must occur.
My group uses molecular modeling and simulation to predict how biological molecules interact with each other. Generally, models used to study molecular interactions are very simplified. However, combining data from our experimental collaborators with some new lipid computational models developed by my team, we now have a computer model of the Escherichia coli outer surface that is realistic in composition and large enough to visualize the impact of antibiotics. It is really exciting to see the molecules moving about finding their ideal positions as they interact with each other in the simulations that we perform on high-performance computing resources—what we are discovering is that the complexity of biology should be neither underestimated nor neglected.
Who would you like to sit next to at a dinner party?
I am going to pick a non-scientist, because it would be almost impossible to pick just one scientist. Assuming I can have someone who is no longer with us, I would like to sit next to the writer Hunter S. Thompson. It would certainly be an entertaining dinner. His contempt for authority, complete submergence in counterculture, and the establishment of “gonzo journalism” would provide him with plenty of material to keep the conversation flowing. Just to be clear, I do not personally advocate all his lifestyle choices; I just like his writing (and I think a part of me still wants to be a journalist).