Michigan Center for Structural Biology Home Page

The Michigan Center for Structural Biology at Michigan State University is a group of facilities providing state-of-the-art instrumentation to examine the molecular structure and function of biomolecules. Resources include protein x-ray crystallography, nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR), electron paramagnetic resonance (EPR), laser spectroscopy, computer-aided molecular modeling and visualization, and a new beamline sector at the synchrotron radiation facility at Argonne National Laboratory.

What is Structural Biology?

Structural Biology can be defined as the study of the structure and the structure-function relationships of biologically important molecules and macromolecular complexes. It lies at the interfaces between biology, chemistry, physics, and engineering, and focuses on understanding the structures of complex macromolecules from living organisms. Accordingly, a number of disciplines and techniques are currently being employed towards achieving these goals: x-ray crystallography, electron paramagnetic resonance (EPR), nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR), computational biology and chemistry, various laser-based spectroscopic techniques, protein expression, synthetic chemistry and chemical engineering.

Goals

Provide state-of-the-art instrumentation and facilities for biomolecular structure/function research to scientists across the state.
Create a collaborative, synergistic research environment among and between universities and industry, to promote major advances in understanding of structure and catalytic mechanism.
Foster commercial application of the knowledge gained from these studies.
Leverage federal money for the future development of new technologies.

Scientific Emphases

Obtaining high-resolution structures of membrane proteins, which are major drug targets by x-ray, NMR and EPR methods.
Analyzing protein interactions with drugs, ligands, DNA, RNA and other proteins by x-ray, NMR, and computational methods.
Determining the mechanism of protein function & folding, important in disease and aging, by EPR, laser spectroscopy, and single molecule methods.
Developing methods for protein expression and purification to enable large scale production of proteins for structure-function analysis.

Protein Crystal

View a poster about MCSB efforts in
Microsoft Powerpoint format here (~6 MB).

For more information, contact Matt Larson
Copyright Michigan Center for Structural Biology, 2002
updated 6/02