Structural Biology Research Program
A
major component of the structural
biology program of the Office of
Biological and Environmental Research
is the support of user facilities for
studies in structural biology. These
user facilities are available to
academic, industrial, and government
laboratory researchers.
The
structural biology program provides
support for beamlines and end
stations at the synchrotron sources
located at several National
Laboratories.
These
supported facilities are dedicated to
crystallographic and spectroscopic
studies of biological macromolecules,
as well as to the application of
small-angle scattering of x-rays and
x-ray microscopy to biological
systems.
User stations are also supported at neutron beam facilities.
The
research objective of the structural
biology program of BER is to
understand the function of proteins
and protein complexes key to the
recognition and repair of DNA damage
and the bioremediation of
environmental contamination by metals
and radionuclides. These are high
priority research areas for BER.
Research
will focus on determining the high
resolution three dimensional
structures of key proteins, the
changes in protein structure related
to interaction with molecules such as
DNA, metals, organic ligands and the
visualization of multi-protein
complexes, that are essential to
understand DNA repair and
bioremediation. In addition,
computational methods will be used to
predict protein structure and
function from sequence information,
and to model the molecular complexes
formed by protein-protein or
protein-nucleic acid interactions.
See also the Environmental Molecular Sciences Laboratory.
Program Contact:
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