Structural Biology (U01156)

? Credit Points : 10 ? SCQF Level : 10 ? Acronym : BIO-4-BIstrucbi

The aim of this part of the course is to enrich your knowledge of cellular activities by providing you with structural details of the key molecular players and their interactions. Modern structural biology has shown us how numerous proteins are able to carry out their functions - in other words, how they actually 'work'. It is not possible to appreciate just how far we have advanced in recent years in our understanding of cell and molecular biology without sampling the wealth of three-dimensional structures of proteins, protein-nucleic acid complexes, and macromolecular assemblies now available. In this course we have selected examples of structures that we consider to be most interesting and illustrative, or most important to fundamental processes such as DNA packaging and unpackaging, transcription, translation and correct folding of polypepitdes to form proteins. We shall also provide some introductory material on protein and nucleic acid structures at the beginning of the course, and a bioinformatics perspective to engender an appreciation of the role of structural biology in the 'post-genomics era'.

The examples we shall use are chosen by us for a variety of reasons but are by no means the only ones that could be used to illustrate the points that we wish to make. You should therefore recall information from previous lectures, and consider future lectures, to provide other examples of the relationship between biological structure and function.