NEWS ARCHIVE

2010

• 21.01.  Submitted article: M. Buchowiecki and J. Vanicek, "Direct evaluation of the temperature dependence of the rate constant based on the quantum instanton approximation."

• 18.01.  Submitted article: T. Zimmermann and J. Vanicek, "Three applications of path integrals: equilibrium and kinetic isotope effects, and the temperature dependence of the rate constant of the [1,5] sigmatropic hydrogen shift in (Z)-1,3-pentadiene."

2009

• 18.12.  Submitted article: T. Zimmermann, J. Ruppen, B. Li, and J. Vanicek:  "Efficient evaluation of the accuracy of molecular quantum dynamics on an approximate analytical or interpolated potential energy surface."

• 15.12. Submitted article: R. Marin and J. Vanicek: "Specificity of microRNA target predictions improved by RNA secondary structure calculations."

• 02.11. Our article "Path integral evaluation of the equilibrium isotope effect in [1,5] sigmatropic hydrogen shift reactions" is now published in the special number of Flash Informatique dedicated to the high performance computing in the EPFL.

• 01.09. Our article "Efficient evaluation of accuracy of molecular quantum dynamics using dephasing representation" was the most downloaded scientific paper in the Journal of Chemical Physics in August 2009! See the announcement here.

• 01.04. Master projects are available for the fall semester 2009.

2008

• 18.08. Ray Marin Florez joined our group as a Ph.D. student. Baiqing Li joined the group as a postdoctoral fellow.

• 02.07. Our theoretical prediction (published in PNAS in March) that microRNAs regulate viral immediate early genes in herpesviruses has a new experimental confirmation and the first citation in today's Letter to Nature by Umbach et al.:  MicroRNAs expressed by herpes simplex virus 1 during latent infection regulate viral mRNAs. Their Letter concludes by: `Our observation that HSV-1 miRNAs are capable of downregulating key viral immediate early proteins is consistent with the recent proposal-based primarily on computational data-that herpesviruses in general may use viral miRNAs "as part of their strategy to enter and maintain latency" [28].

• 01.07. Marcin Buchowiecki joined the group as a postdoctoral fellow. Tomas Zimmermann joined the group for summer internship.

• 14.04. Version 10 of AMBER software suite has been released. Our contribution was the code for thermodynamic integration with respect to mass, and the section in the manual on isotope effects. The method is based on the AMBER implementation of Path Integral Molecular Dynamics and is useful for calculation of both equilibrium and kinetic isotope effects.

• 08.04. Our article "Suppression of immediate-early gene expression by herpesvirus-coded microRNAs: Implications for latency" was featured in the "In This Issue" section of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the USA. See "Herpesvirus miRNAs control latency."

• 25.03. Master projects are available for the fall semester 2008.

• 01.03. Cesare Mollica joined the group as a PhD student.

2007

• 03.10 Jiri Vanicek is now at EPFL.