Harel Weinstein

About

Harel Weinstein, D.Sc. is the Maxwell Upson Professor of Physiology and Biophysics and former Chairman of the Department of Physiology and Biophysics, and the Director of the Institute for Computational Biomedicine at Weill Cornell Medical College of Cornell University in New York City. As a Tri-Institutional Professor, he holds professorial appointments at Rockefeller University, Sloan-Kettering Institute and Cornell University. As the founding director of the Institute for Computational Biomedicine (ICB), he has developed it into an academic and research unit responsible for a novel approach to biomedicine that involves the mathematical, physical and computational sciences in combination with engineering and medical informatics. The ICB aims at fundamental study and practical use of the basic, quantitative understanding of physiological function and disease, in an integrative, multi-scale approach based on gene structure and defects responsible for properties and behaviors at all levels–from protein, to cell, tissue and organ. His lab is devoted to studies in molecular and computational biophysics that address complex systems in physiology, and to the development and application of bioinformatics and engineering approaches to systems biology. The Weinstein lab studies complex systems in physiology with methods of molecular and computational biophysics, bioinformatics and mathematical models. The work addresses structural and dynamic mechanisms in fundamental biological…

Research topics

• Chemistry
• Internal medicine
• Biochemistry
• Virology
• Biology
• Medicine
• Biophysics
• Pharmacology

Selected publications

• GPCRmd uncovers the dynamics of the 3D-GPCRome

  Nature Methods · 2020-07-13 · 197 citations

  articleOpen access
  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Localization atomic force microscopy

  Nature · 2021-06-16 · 196 citations

  articleOpen access
  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Host protein kinases required for SARS-CoV-2 nucleocapsid phosphorylation and viral replication

  Science Signaling · 2022-10-25 · 97 citations

  articleOpen access

  Multiple coronaviruses have emerged independently in the past 20 years that cause lethal human diseases. Although vaccine development targeting these viruses has been accelerated substantially, there remain patients requiring treatment who cannot be vaccinated or who experience breakthrough infections. Understanding the common host factors necessary for the life cycles of coronaviruses may reveal conserved therapeutic targets. Here, we used the known substrate specificities of mammalian protein…

  PublisherDOI

• The FDA-approved drug Alectinib compromises SARS-CoV-2 nucleocapsid phosphorylation and inhibits viral infection in vitro

  bioRxiv (Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory) · 2020 · 63 citations

  While vaccines are vital for preventing COVID-19 infections, it is critical to develop new therapies to treat patients who become infected. Pharmacological targeting of a host factor required for viral replication can suppress viral spread with a low probability of viral mutation leading to resistance. In particular, host kinases are highly druggable targets and a number of conserved coronavirus proteins, notably the nucleoprotein (N), require phosphorylation for full functionality. In order to…

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Phosphatidylinositol phosphates modulate interactions between the StarD4 sterol trafficking protein and lipid membranes

  Journal of Biological Chemistry · 2022 · 22 citations

  and to a lesser degree PI(3,5)P2). Monophosphorylated PIPs and other anionic lipids had a smaller effect on sterol transport. This enhancement of transport was less effective when the same PIPs were present in the acceptor membranes. Furthermore, using molecular dynamics (MD) simulations, we mapped the key interaction sites of StarD4 with PIP-containing membranes and identified residues that are important for this interaction and for accelerated sterol transport activity. We show that StarD4 rec…

  PublisherDOI

Recent grants

• NIH Grant R01DA006620

  NIH · $1.6M · 1996

• NIH Grant R01DA015170

  NIH · $2.8M · 2015

• BIGDATA: IA: Collaborative Research: In Situ Data Analytics for Next Generation Molecular Dynamics Workflows

  NSF · $547k · 2017–2023

Frequent coauthors

• George Khelashvili

  Cornell University

  141 shared

• Jonathan A. Javitch

  New York State Psychiatric Institute

  110 shared

• Roman Osman

  Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai

  81 shared

• Lei Shi

  National Institutes of Health

  80 shared

• Jack Peter Green

  Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai

  52 shared

• Saul Maayani

  City University of New York

  50 shared

• Matthias Quick

  Columbia University Irving Medical Center

  48 shared

• Michael V. Levine

  Cornell University

  46 shared

Awards & honors

• elected to the Executive Board of the International Society…
• President of the Biophysical Society in 2008
• President of the International Society for Quantum Biology a…

Similar researchers at Cornell University

• Olivier Elementoh-150
• Karsten Suhreh-119
• Jan Krumsiekh-69