Mission Statement
The Harmon lab studies the basic principles of biomolecular condensates. The main focus is the thermodynamics of formation and the impact of incorporating enzymes into droplets. The goal is to build an understanding of how chemically active droplets can be integrated into cellular signaling networks.
Research Focus
Thermodynamically driven droplets
- Connecting polymer features to their emergent droplet features
- Connecting sequence level features to the polymer features
- Designing proteins for tuning droplet features
Chemically active droplets
- Examining the impact of droplets on reactions for cells
- Energy dependent bifurcations in droplet state
- Critical behavior that induces hysteresis in droplet concentrations
- Connecting activity in droplets to cell regulation and cell signaling
Techniques
- Monte Carlo polymer lattice
- Monte Carlo all-atom protein simulations
- Molecular dynamics coarse-grained simulations
- Cahn Hilliard
- Reaction-diffusion equations
- Effective droplet models
