• Computational Biophysics at Illinois Tech

    We use and develop theoretical chemistry and biophysical techniques to understand the physical basis of biological phenomena.

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  • Computational Biophysics at Illinois Tech

    We use and develop theoretical chemistry and biophysical techniques to understand the physical basis of biological phenomena.

    Read More

About Our Group

The Wereszczynski Lab focuses on using and developing theoretical chemistry and biophysical techniques to discern the physical basis of biological phenomena. To do this, we perform intensive computer simulations that quantify the motions of proteins, DNA, and other biological molecules to determine how their functions are influenced by their dynamics, and how these properties are influenced by interactions with other organic and inorganic molecules that exist in the cell.

We are members of the IIT Physics Department, and the Center for Molecular Study of Condensed Soft Matter (uCoSM), which is part of the Pritzker Institute of Biomedical Science & Engineering at IIT. In addition, we are affiliated with the Biophysics Collaborative Access Team (BioCAT), an NIH funded X-ray facility located at Argonne National Laboratory.

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Recent News

Congratulations to Eve!

Congratulations to Dr. Havva (Eve) Kohestani for the excellent defense of her thesis “Structure and Dynamics of Modified Nucleosome Under Epigenetic Regulation.” Well done Eve!
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Congratulations to Dustin!

Congratulations to Dr. Dustin Woods for defending his thesis “An Exploration Into the Effects of Chromatin Structural Proteins on the Dynamics and Energetic Landscape of Nucleosome Architectures.” Dustin will be moving on from our group and has accepted a position as a Senior Scientist in Computational Chemistry at Evotec.
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Biophysical Society 2022

After a bit of a hiatus, it was great to be back at the Biophysical Society Meeting! Dustin gave an excellent talk in the Multiscale Genome Organization subgroup titled “The Influence of Linker Histones on Chromatin Dynamics and Energetics”! It was also great to reconnect with colleagues we hadn’t seen ...
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NIH Renews our MIRA Funding

We’re very excited to announce that the NIH has renewed our R35 MIRA award for the next five years! The proposal “Probing the Structure/Function/Dynamics Relationship in Biomolecular Complexes with Multiscale Computational Techniques” will continue to fund projects in our group that use computational methods to explore and quantify how dynamic ...
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Congratulations to Joseph!

Congratulations to Joseph for doing an excellent job defending his thesis “Computational Study on the Heme Scavenging Ability of Staphylococcus Aureus IsdH Receptor: Utilizing Molecular Dynamics to Understand an Unknown Mechanism.” Well done Dr. Clayton!
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Selected Publications

“Directed inter-domain motions enable the IsdH Staphylococcus aureus receptor to rapidly extract heme from human hemoglobin”

J. Clayton, K. Ellis-Guardiola, B. Mahoney, J. Soule, R. T. Clubb, Jeff Wereszczynski

“Elucidating the Influence of Linker Histone Variants on Chromatosome Dynamics and Energetics”

D. C. Woods and J. Wereszczynski

“Salmonella Membrane Structural Remodeling Increases Resistance to Antimicrobial Peptide LL-37”

M. W. Martynowycz*, A. Rice* , K. Andreev, T. M. Nobre, I. Kuzmenko, J. Wereszczynski, D. Gidalevitz

“Determining Atomistic SAXS Models of Tri-Ubiquitin Chains from Bayesian Analysis of Accelerated Molecular Dynamics Simulations”

S. Bowerman*, A. Rana*, A. Rice, G. Pham, E. Strieter, J. Wereszczynski