Busra Tayhan

Doctoral Student at Sabancı University

Academic Journey

Busra completed her B.Sc. in Molecular Biology and Genetics at Yıldız Technical University in 2021, where her passion for computational frameworks began to take shape. Driven by a desire to blend experimental biology with advanced computation, she pursued an M.Sc. in Molecular Biology, Genetics, and Bioengineering at Sabancı University while joining the MIDSTLab. During her master’s studies, she focused on elucidating protein conformational landscapes through various enhanced sampling methods—a foundation that culminated in her receiving her M.Sc. degree in 2025. Busra is now continuing her academic journey as a Doctoral Student in the same rigorous program.

Beyond the Lab

Outside of her research, Busra leads a balanced life that fuels her creative and analytical endeavors. Whether she’s pumping iron at the gym, engaging in immersive video games, or catching up on the latest anime, she believes in the power of diverse experiences. Meditation and metal music provide her with a steady rhythm and focus, and she continually seeks to enhance her programming skills, blending her love for biology and computation into a dynamic career.

Research Focus

Pipeline Synopsis Her current research investigates the dynamic conformational landscape of calmodulin (CaM), a calcium‐binding protein essential to numerous cellular processes. By considering two principal degrees of freedom—one capturing the rotational motion between the protein’s lobes and the other describing its overall compactness—her work aims to distill CaM’s complex structural variability into a model that reveals how environmental conditions influence its conformations. Recognizing that traditional molecular dynamics (MD) simulations can be limited by high-energy barriers and timescale constraints, her group employs well-tempered metadynamics using these degrees of freedom as collective variables to systematically explore four distinct conditions corresponding to calcium-bound and unbound states at both physiological and low ionic strengths.

A recent publication by her research team, “High Throughput Mutational Scanning of a Protein via Alchemistry on a High‐Performance Computing Resource” (DOI: 10.1002/cpe.8371), further underscores the group’s commitment to advanced computational methodologies. This study details the development of an automated pipeline leveraging GPU-accelerated alchemical free energy perturbation (FEP) simulations on high-performance computing (HPC) systems to perform large-scale mutational scanning on dihydrofolate reductase (DHFR). The work demonstrates the feasibility of efficiently and accurately quantifying how point mutations affect protein-drug binding free energies—a framework that can inspire similar approaches to unravel the subtle conformational changes observed in CaM.

Publications

  • Guclu T.F., Tayhan B., Cetin E., Atilgan A.R., Atilgan C.
    High throughput mutational scanning of a protein via alchemistry on a high-performance computing resource
    Concurrency and Computation: Practice and Experience, 2025, 37, 38371.
    https://doi.org/10.1002/cpe.8371 – Research Article (Published).

  • Tayhan B., Horozoglu S., Coban D., Atilgan A.R., Atilgan C.
    Mapping Conformational Dynamics Across Environmental Shifts
    14th Chemical Physics Congress, Edirne, Turkey, September 2024. – Selected Talk
  • Tayhan B., Atilgan A.R., Atilgan C.
    Protean Nature of Calmodulin: Mapping Conformational Dynamics Across Environmental Shifts
    ECCB2024, Turku, Finland, September 2024. – Poster Presentation
  • Guclu T.F., Tayhan B., Cetin E., Atilgan A.R., Atilgan C.
    High throughput mutational scanning of a protein via alchemistry on a high-performance computing resource
    Basarim 2024 8th High-Performance Computing Conference, Ankara, Turkey, May 2024. – Selected Talk
  • Tayhan B., Atilgan A.R., Atilgan C.
    The Effect of Conformational Dynamics on Calmodulin-Mediated Sensor Activity
    9th International BAU Drug Design Congress, Istanbul, Turkey, November 2023. – Selected Talk
  • Tayhan B., Atilgan A.R., Atilgan C.
    Conformational Effects of Calcium Stripping from Calmodulin
    HIBIT 2023, Ankara, Turkey, October 2023. – Selected Talk