Emir Selman has joined the group to work on his bachelor project, where he will be studying the so-called maquette structures computationally.
The Maquette structures are simple four-helix peptides, which can have a flavin and a tryptophan attached, and thereby model the primary photochemistry of the much more complex cryptochrome proteins. Thus the maquette structures can be used to study the production and dynamics of a magnetosensitive radical pair, and investigation of these systems may provide new insights into radical pair-based magnetoreception in migratory song birds.