Modelització i simulació de l'estructura i activitat de receptors de membrana

The design of effective and selective therapeutic agents requires a detailed understanding of the processes of drug-receptor interactions and the mechanisms involved in the evolution of pharmacological responses elicited by ligand-receptor interactions. The lack of 3-D structures of receptors explains the interest in the insight into receptor processes that can be obtained from models of receptor systems. These receptor models provide guidelines form designing new structurally active and selective compounds and for studying the process of signal transduction in the cell. To this end, we will define the structure-activity relationships among ligands which act at the 5HTla receptor in order to establish the elements of recognition and activation. These findings will provide the molecular basis for the difference between agonist and antagonist and for discriminating between the structural p