Chemical Structure & Dynamics

The ever-increasing body of protein and nucleic acid structural information has brought to the fore the importance of a chemical perspective in biology. Researchers at the University of Pittsburgh and Carnegie Mellon University pursue this viewpoint in a variety of exciting ways. Novel small molecules are synthesized in the critical endeavor of designing new drugs – and the modes by which these potential drugs bind to protein "targets" are investigated using biochemical and computational approaches. Synthetic protein-like molecules are custom designed and synthesized. Light scattering techniques are used to probe biological fluid systems.

Participating Faculty in this Area:

• Catalina Achim, Biology-inspired chemistry
• Rob Coalson, Theory of chemical dynamics
• Robert Swendsen, Computer simulations of biological molecules
• Peter Wipf, Bioorganic chemistry
• Xiao-Lun Wu, Dynamics of biological fluids
• Maria Kurnikova, Molecular dynamics & function of channels
• Hagai Meirovitch, Protein structure analysis
• Daniel Zuckerman, Molecular dynamics & coarse grained simulations
• Billy Day, Proteomics
• Sanford Asher, Protein folding, structure & dynamics by Raman spectroscopy
• Sunil Saxena, EPR spectroscopy
• Miguel Llinas, NMR of metalloproteins