Biosciences

Research in Argonne's Biosciences division is aimed at defining the biological and medical hazards to humans from energy technologies and new energy options. The division is organized into two scientific sections, Biophysics and Functional Genomics, plus a Structural Biology Center that operates two beamlines at the Advanced Photon Source. Each section comprises several research groups that often interact with one another.

Biophysics

The goal of biophysics is to understand life processes in terms of organic and physical chemistry. Our research spans a broad spectrum of biological investigation, including molecular modeling, protein engineering, the structure and shape (conformation) of proteins, and interactions among large biological molecules. The majority of the work is tailored toward a broader understanding of structure and function relationships in proteins using a wide-variety of state-of-the-art techniques.

Structural genomics attempts to provide the link between the vast amount of genomic sequence data that is being generated and the structure of the proteins that these genomes encode. The eventual goal of the project is to obtain a complete database of unique folds in proteins and to be able to predict the three-dimensional structures of all proteins from their gene sequences.

Structural Biology is specifically concerned with determining a structure of large biological molecules and how their structure dictates their function. This field is the glue that links structural and functional genomics. The primary goals are to discover the folding patterns of a protein, the final three-dimensional structure of the biomolecule, the physical mechanisms of biological function, and the dynamics within and between molecular complexes.

Argonne's Advanced Photon Source provides an invaluable tool for the Structural Biology Center within the Biosciences division.

Functional genomics

Despite the ability to determine a gene's sequence, and possibly the resulting protein's structure, the relationship of the sequence and structure to the biological function is more elusive. Functional genomics aims to determine how genes and their products work and are regulated. Functional genomics is an another area of research that is helping to unlock the potential offered by genome sequencing data. These efforts both benefit from and contribute to structural genomics efforts.

For more information, visit some of the World Wide Web pages within Argonne's Biosciences Division.