Zhao Suwen’s group currently focuses on the study of membrane
protein signaling mechanisms and their ligand/drug discovery.
Many membrane proteins such as G protein-coupled receptors
have been intensively researched and have a lot of known
ligands. However, where do these ligands bind and how do they
bind are not known for most cases. We use docking, together with
mutation data, SAR data, selectivity data and potentially many
other data, to find binding sites and poses of known ligands of
membrane proteins. Once we get the accurate binding poses, we
try to understand the mechanism of these molecules. Once we
understand the mechanism of these molecules, we have a very
good background to do structure-based drug discovery/design for
those targets, and to discover novel/allosteric/biased ligands.