Structural Biology

Catalog description

The goal of the course is to provide students with a basic understanding of three-dimensional structures of soluble proteins, membrane proteins and RNA. Structural biology is a powerful approach to understand biochemical problems, and widely used in the pharmaceutical industry for drug design. One example topic in this course is the structural analysis of G-protein coupled receptors, which are targets for 50% of the drugs on the market. Several cutting-edge methods that allow structure determination at atomic resolution will be covered, with a focus on cryo-electron microscopy, SAXS and X-ray crystallography. A big portion of the class are hands-on computer tutorials in structural analysis and structure determination. Students will perform structure analysis research projects and create figures with molecular graphics software to illustrate the results. Tutorials include VMD, PyMol, COOT, Chimera, Alphafold, Phenix, cryo-SPARC, and Artificial Intelligence tools, as well as several web-based structure prediction servers. The course will include hands-on practicals in X-ray crystallography and cryo-electron microscopy. Students will learn about molecular structure determination techniques as well as the biological relevance of molecular structure-function relationships. PREREQUISITE: CHEM104/105/106 OR CHEM 107-108 OR CHEM 111. Textbook: Freely available literature will be used.