Understanding the structural and dynamical basis of protein function

Description of projects available to graduate students:
Three of the four NIH projects in Dr. Xu's laboratory focus on preparing graduate students for the post-genome era when structure-function and dynamics-function relationships hold the key to many new and exciting discoveries in biomedical sciences. Rotation students will have the opportunities to participate in one of the on-going projects to learn (1) expression and purification of membrane proteins, (2) structural determination of functional segments of ligand-gated ion channels in their native membrane environment, (3) analysis of drug-protein interaction, and (4) elucidation of molecular mechanisms of drug actions.

Techniques graduate student will learn:
DNA cloning and sequencing, mutagenesis, membrane protein expression and purification, FPLC, HPLC, high-resolution liquid and solid state NMR, computer modeling, and 3-D structural rendering.