Suwen Zhao

Zhao Suwen’s group currently focuses on the study of membraneprotein signaling mechanisms and their ligand/drug discovery.Many membrane proteins such as G protein-coupled receptorshave been intensively researched and have a lot of knownligands. However, where do these ligands bind and how do theybind are not known for most cases. We use docking, together withmutation data, SAR data, selectivity data and potentially manyother data, to find binding sites and poses of known ligands ofmembrane proteins. Once we get the accurate binding poses, wetry to understand the mechanism of these molecules. Once weunderstand the mechanism of these molecules, we have a verygood background to do structure-based drug discovery/design forthose targets, and to discover novel/allosteric/biased ligands.