CSB Philosophy
The ¹ú²úÔ´´ Center for Structural Biology (CSB) is part of a major trans-institutional initiative to significantly upgrade the capabilities in Structural Biology at ¹ú²úÔ´´ by bringing additional faculty and state-of-the-art instrumentation to campus. The CSB was developed to promote the broad use of structural biology approaches in all life science research and to provide a focal point that bridges medicine and biology to math, chemistry and physics.
The philosophy of the CSB at ¹ú²úÔ´´ is to integrate the application of all techniques that can provide the atomic resolution structure of biomacromolecules. The merging of applications of the traditional high resolution structural biology disciplines,ÌýX-ray Crystallography,ÌýNMR SpectroscopyÌý²¹²Ô»åÌýComputational Biology, along with electron microscopy and fluorescence and EPR spectroscopies, is especially unique. This strategy is being increasingly recognized as the necessary approach to solve fundamental structural problems in medicine and biology. Establishing an environment that provides to all available tools provides ¹ú²úÔ´´ investigators with key competitive advantages. This philosophy is being successfully applied in exciting ways in collaborations with investigators from a range of departments in both the College of Arts and Science and the School of Medicine Basic Sciences.
CSB Contacts
CSB Consultation
The CSB promotes structural thinking and enables structural biology research in all life science and medical research programs at ¹ú²úÔ´´.
Structural biology research and structure determination can involve a number of different experimental as well as computational approaches. The CSB offers free consultations to introduce ¹ú²úÔ´´ investigators to structural biology and their projects to the CSB faculty and staff scientists. This initial contact involves the project PI and associated scientists meeting with a selection of CSB scientific directors and CSB staff scientists to define the potential structural aspects of the research and determine in what way the CSB can help. The CSB scientific staff is available to provide hands-on guidance in specialized structural biology laboratory techniques, instrumentation and data analysis.