LAHORE – Punjab University (PU) Vice-Chancellor (VC) Dr Mujahid Kamran on Monday inaugurated a five-day workshop on “Computational Resources for Protein Modelling”, at the Institute of Biochemistry & Biotechnology’s (IBB) auditorium. Dr Clair Naylor from the UK will deliver two video lectures during the workshop. The basic objective of the workshop is to deal with protein structure-function relationship and application on the principles in designing protein molecules for increasing activity and improving their properties for applications.
Addressing the inaugural session, Dr Kamran said that scientific development was not possible without a strong moral character and honesty, therefore, students and faculty members should do more research in their fields with true commitment. He said that the universe was very vast and a ray of light needed 40,000 to 50,000 light years to travel from one end to another end of a galaxy. The PU VC said that DNA was the centre of structure of life and the mystery of life was still unsolved even after many efforts. Dr Amin Athar said that the workshop had been designed to polish the creative skills of students.
He said the workshop would provide a chance to scientists to exchange their research and learn from each other’s experiences and will be instrumental in providing knowledge about the latest bioinformatics tools available for designing protein molecules for improving properties for applications. Dr Kausar Abdullah Malik said that computational sciences had been very helpful in solving many technical problems and development in this field was due to bioinformatics tools.
He said that the launch of special courses and degree classes in relevant areas of computational sciences will help produce researchers who would bring about new innovations. Dr Waheed Akhtar said that Brazilians discovered protein some 200 years ago and it remained focus of biological sciences in the 1950s and 1960s. He said that development in biological sciences was not possible without doing research on protein and students and faculty members could also predict the structure of molecules due to computational resources. “Computational resources have made various processes easy,” he added.
