Project Grant 2442804

The National Science Foundation (NSF), through its Division of Chemistry's "Chemistry of Life Processes Program," awarded a $469,645 Project Grant to Dr. Colin Kinz-Thompson at Rutgers University-Newark. The grant, with a performance period from May 1, 2025 to April 30, 2030, will fund research to investigate the mechanistic roles of receptor oligomerization in molecular signaling processes. The project aims to determine how bacteria accurately sense their surroundings and develop machine learning tools for protein design. Key objectives include experimentally characterizing the thermodynamic forces driving methyl-accepting chemotaxis protein (MCP) receptor function and oligomerization, as well as exploring the interpretability and evolutionary information content of protein language models. The research will leverage single-molecule fluorescence resonance energy transfer microscopy, native protein mass spectrometry, free energy perturbation calculations, and fluorescence super-resolution microscopy. Additionally, the project will support a training pipeline for undergraduate researchers, a seminar series for graduate students and postdocs on machine learning techniques, and the development of an undergraduate course on the intersection of machine learning and biomolecules.