Collaborative research at FIAS
The MBN@FIAS is tightly intertwined with the research interests and activities of other groups at FIAS producing a solid basis for joint highly interdisciplinary ventures.
- Our recently developed multiscale approach to the Physics of ion beam cancer therapy, investigations of DNA unzipping, mechanical properties, and molecular mechanisms of single and double strand breaks in DNA are important for the molecular level understanding of the ion-beam cancer therapy. These studies are bundled with the nuclear physics research conducted by the groups of Prof. Dr. I. Mishustin and Prof. Dr. W. Greiner.
- Our interest in clustering, self-organization and structure-formation phenomena on the nanoscale has important parallels in nuclear and sub- nuclear physics, astrophysics, biophysics, biology and neuroscience, i.e. practically in the whole spectrum of disciplines presented at FIAS.
- Jointly with Prof. S. Schramm we attempt to take advantage of parallel computing architecture CUDA (originally an acronym for Compute Unified Device Architecture) for the description of dynamics of MBN systems. CUDA is the computing engine in NVIDIA graphics processing units or GPUs, that is accessible to software developers through industry standard programming languages. Programmers use 'C for CUDA' (C with NVIDIA extensions), compiled through a PathScale Open64 C compiler, to code algorithms for execution on the GPU. CUDA architecture supports a range of computational interfaces including OpenCLand DirectX Compute. Additionally, an OpenCL-based program was developed and extensive calculations have been carried out. These computations were performed on the CPU/GPU cluster "LOEWE-CSC" at the Center of Scientific Computing (CSC) in Frankfurt.
Our group’s MesoBioNano-Science seminar is opened for the whole FIAS community and is attended by members of other groups at FIAS interested in a particular topic of our work. Members of the group present their important results at the FIAS seminars and colloquia.
Former collaborations at FIAS
- Our studies of antigen-antibody interactions at atomistic level provide the justified input for larger scale models in theoretical immunology which have been developed in Dr. M. Meyer-Hermann’s group.
- The theoretical methods employed by our group are also a field for intra-FIAS collaboration. The ab initio quantum mechanical methods based on density functional theory (DFT) are widely used in our calculations. These methods are a main tool of theoretical research in quantum chemistry, represented at FIAS by Dr. R. Berger and his group. Global optimization techniques are a very important component of our toolbox which we share with a number of disciplines, in particular with nuclear physics (Prof. Dr. W. Greiner) and theoretical biology (Dr. M. Meyer-Hermann).