Dr. Halima Mouhib - Data Science
Date: - Location: Eurecom
Abstract: In contrast to hearing and vision, the exact function of the olfactory sense remains largely unknown. This impacts many areas of research ranging from fragrance chemistry, to odor perception and sensor design in artificial noses. Recent advances in AI technologies started to pave the way towards digitizing odors for structure-based odor predictions and broadening our understanding of structure odor relationships. However, there are still many open ends and questions before the sense of smell is successfully digitized and new knowledge can be transferred to other applications such as bio-mimetic sensor design. One problem that is currently holding back the advancement in the field is our fragmentary understanding of the molecular detection mechanisms underlying the olfactory sense. During the seminar, I will give an overview of the advances and challenges in the field and show part of the projects that we are working on at the VU. Here, one of our main objectives is to unravel and to quantify the uptake mechanisms of odorants and other volatile organic molecules through binding proteins for applications in bio-mimetic sensor units. Bio: Dr. Halima Mouhib is assistant professor in bioinformatics at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. During her PhD at the RWTH Aachen, she specialized in the structural characterization of odorants and bioactive compounds in different states of aggregation using experimental techniques, and subsequently expanded her research focus towards structural bioinformatics through an EMBO and Theodore-von-Kármán fellowship to study protein unfolding. In 2019, she obtained her habilitation at the University Paris-Est entitled “Understanding molecular interactions in olfactory research - From High Resolution Spectroscopy to Multi-Scale Computational Methods”. Later, she was awarded the Descartes-Huygens award 2020 by the Koninklijke Nederlandse Akademie van Wetenschappen, to study how odorants are absorbed from the gas-phase through binding proteins in order to mimic the absorption of fragrances in the nose. At the VU, her main research focus is to elucidate and quantify molecular mechanisms of complex biological processes at an atomistic scale using advanced computational techniques.
