The diverse interests of our faculty reflect the multidisciplinary nature of biophysics. Participating labs apply a wide range of approaches in their search for fundamental principles underlying the many reactions and interactions in living systems. The list of faculty interests is broad and overlapping, indicative of this integrative program.
PMCB faculty • Mario Amzel –structure and thermodynamics of binding proteins, structure and mechanism of pyrophosphatases, ATPases, and oxidation/reduction enzymes • Doug Barrick –stability and folding of modular proteins, structure and sequence analysis of protein evolution, protein-protein interactions in signaling pathways • Greg Bowman –structural biology of molecular machines involved in nucleosome remodeling • Ludwig Brand –protein-ligand interactions, fluorescence spectroscopy of macromolecular complexes • Greg Chirikjian –computational mechanics of large proteins, conformational statistics of biological macromolecules, applied mathematics • Philip Cole –chemical and biochemical approaches to signal transduction • Richard Cone –mucosal protection by antibodies • David Draper –RNA stability and electrostatics, RNA-protein recognition • Karen Fleming –membrane protein folding, thermodynamics of protein-protein interactions in membranes, membrane protein modeling • Bertrand García-Moreno –experimental and computational studies of protein electrostatics, structure-based energy calculations, regulatory interactions in viruses • Jeffrey Gray –biomolecular modeling, protein-protein docking, protein-surface interactions, nanoassembly and design • Rachel Green –functional analysis of the ribosome using rapid kinetic and spectroscopic approaches • Marc Greenberg –studies on DNA damage and repair, and their applications • Blake Hill –NMR studies of protein folding, computational protein design, modeling protein dynamics using NMR spin relaxation date, and structural biology • Jan Hoh –biophysical interactions between biological macromolecules and macromolecular complexes, development of new technology and biomedical applications for scanned probe microscopes • Kalina Hristova –membrane-protein interactions, calculations of 3D membrane structure from 1D x-ray/neutron scattering profiles, prediction methods for membrane protein topology • Daniel Leahy –crystallography of proteins in cell-cell interactions, signaling • Juliette Lecomte –structure and dynamics of proteins in solution by NMR spectroscopy • Jon Lorsch –molecular mechanics of eukaryotic translation • Roger McMacken –function of multiprotein assemblies, initiation mechanisms for DNA replication, mechanisms of molecular chaperone action • Albert Mildvan –NMR studies of enzyme mechanisms (laboratory closed) • Paul Miller –nucleic acid bioorganic chemistry • Evangelos Moudrianakis –chromatin structure and function • Marc Ostermeier –biomolecular engineering • Peter Pedersen –cell energetics and its relationship to the diseases cancer and cystic fibrosis • Sean Prigge –crystallography of malaria proteins • Peter Privalov –thermodynamics of protein folding • George Rose –theoretical approaches to protein and RNA folding • Justine Roth –metalloenzyme catalysis, mechanistic studies of O2 activation and protein damage by reactive oxygen species • Scheherazade Sadegh-Nasseri –mechanisms of T cell activation and unresponsiveness, mechanisms of antigen processing and presentation • Joel Schildbach –structural, biochemical, and functional studies of proteins involved in DNA transfer by bacterial comjugation • Robert Schleif –mechanism of protein function, particularly regulatory proteins, using genetic, biochemical, biophysical, and computational methods • David Shortle –protein folding and stability, NMR analysis of denatured protein, prediction of protein structure from sequence • James Stivers –enzymology of DNA repair and topoisomerases, structure and mechanism by NMR spectroscopy, inhibitor design • Joel Tolman –biomolecular recognition, structural genomics, experimental and theoretical NMR • Craig Townsend –natural product chemistry, enzymology and molecular biology, fatty acid synthase inhibitors for cancer, tuberculosis and obesity • Herschel Wade –molecular mechanisms of ligand-dependent transcriptional activation-repression, broadly-specific receptor-ligand systems • Denis Wirtz –micromanipulation of individual molecules and live cell biophysics • Cynthia Wolberger –structural studies of transcription regulation, crystallography of transcriptional silencing enzymes • Sarah Woodson –folding and dynamics of RNA and RNA-protein complexes • Tom Woolf –computational biophysics of membrane systems, membrane proteins, and protein:lipid interactions; development of new methods for relative free energy and conformational transitions, computational analysis of ligand binding • Jie Xiao –single molecule and single cell approaches to the molecular biology of the cell • Jin Zhang –spatiotemporal regulation of kinase activities and second messenger dynamics
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