Physical Biochemistry

Catalog description

This course provides a descriptive survey of the concepts of physical chemistry with emphasis on their use in applications designed to characterize and manipulate biological molecules and systems. Topics are drawn from thermodynamics (bonding, protein folding energies, linkage, specostropic and differential scanning calorimetric binding measurements), kinetics (enzymatic catalysis, perturbation techniques), statistical mechanics (distributions, ensembles, molecular mechanical & dynamics calculations), electrochemistry, hydrodynamics (diffusion, friction, electrophoresis, viscosity, sedimentation, organism size and shape), quantum mechanics (wave functions operators, uncertainty principle, dipoles, orbitals and resonance energy coupling), and spectroscopy (absorbance and light scattering, fluorescence, nuclear and electronic paramagnetic resonance, MR imaging and x-ray diffraction).