Supercomputing the Secrets Inside Cattle Antibiotics

The Supersized Science podcast features research and discoveries nationwide enabled by advanced computing technology and expertise at the Texas Advanced Computing Center of the University of Texas at Austin. TACC science writer Jorge Salazar hosts the podcast. Chemists have determined for the first time the crystal structure and unlocked the mechanism of activity of a family of enzymes that produce monensin, widely used as a cattle antibiotic. The University of Texas Research Cyberinfrastructure (UTRC) initiative awarded the monensin researchers supercomputer allocations on the Lonestar6 system at the Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) to meet the challenges of modeling the binding sites of monensin. UTRC provides advanced computing capabilities to researchers across all 14 UT System institutions. On the podcast is Lela Vukovic, an associate professor at The University of Texas, at El Paso. She performed the computational studies on the monensin research, published October 2023 in Nature Communications. Music Credit: Raro Bueno, Chuzausen freemusicarchive.org/music/Chuzausen/ Story link: https://tacc.utexas.edu/news/latest-news/2024/02/12/supercomputing-the-secrets-inside-cattle-antibiotics/