Technology

Cryoem

Structural biology plays critical roles in revealing the mechanisms of important cellular processes. While the majority of our structural understanding has derived from crystallography of individual molecules, increasingly it is appreciated that biological function derives from often quite dynamic molecular complexes not amenable to crystallization. A remarkable revolution is now underway in structural biology.

Microfluidics

Microfluidics technology uses microdroplets of water (less than a tenth of the diameter of a human hair) as test tubes, which flow by in channels of inert oil at rates of about 1,000 droplets per second. High-throughput sequencing precisely and super-rapidly analyzes the biological contents of those microdroplets—such as the genetic blueprints (genomes) and activity of millions of individual cells.

Docking

Structure-based ligand discovery begins with the atomic resolution structure of a biological receptor, and seeks to design or discover molecules that will bind to it, modulating the receptor’s function. A central technique to do so is molecular docking. In docking, libraries of about 10 7 molecules are computationally screened for those that fit the structure of the receptor...

MASS SPEC FACILITY

The QBI collaboration, through the Gladstone Institute and the Convergence Zone, is home to a collection of premier mass spectrometers. We specialize in large-scale protein-protein interaction mapping via affinity purification mass spectrometry (AP-MS), with an emphasis on host-pathogen interactions.

X-ray crystallography

X-ray crystallography is a powerful method to derive protein structural information. Pure proteins can be coaxed into forming beautiful crystals.

The Antibiome Center

Founded in 2013 by Professor Jim Wells and Director Michael Hornsby, this center is devoted to identification and generation of recombinant antibodies at a proteome-wide scale

Modeling Protein Structure

Genome sequencing projects are producing linear amino acid sequences, but full understanding of the biological role of these proteins requires knowledge of their structure and function.