Molecular Structure of Biological Materials (BE.442)

Calendar

Lec #	Topics	KEY DATES
1	Important Role of Water Molecule, Hydration of Amino Acids, Protein and Other Biological Materials
2	Amino Acids: Their Chemical and Physical Properties Influence of Ionic Strength, pH, etc.
3	Primary and Secondary Structures of Proteins Dihedral Angles, Peptide Bonds, Planar Structure, Relationship and Propensity of Amino Acid Sequence, Secondary Structure Ramachandran Plot
4	Alpha-helices, 310 Helix, pi Helix, Beta-helices, etc. Variation of Helices and Their Helical Bundles, Two Strand Coiled-coils, Three or Four Strand Coiled-coils, Supercoils Various Helical Rich Protein Structure Models Alpha-helices in Biological Materials
5	Helical Coiled-coils Two-, Three-, Four- Stranded Helical Bundles Applying Coiled-coils to Nanomaterials, Molecular Springs, Switches, etc.
6	Beta Sheets: Antiparallel, Parallel, and Twist Beta Sheet Rich Proteins Beta Sheets in Biological Materials
7	Practical Aspects of Single Crystal X-ray Crystallography, Part 1 X-ray Single Crystal Diffraction, Fiber Diffraction Preparation of the Samples for Diffraction Analyses
8	NMR (Guest Lecturer: Peter Carr, MIT Media Lab)
9	Practical Aspects of Single Crystal X-ray Crystallography, Part 2
10	Analytical Approaches and Instrumentation (Guest Lecturer: Sotirus Koutsopoulos, Ph.D)
11	Silk	Take-home midterm exam out
12	Biomineralization: Sea Creatures
13	Biomineralization: Bones and Teeth
14	Bioadhesives
15	Lipids as Building Materials
16	Polysaccharides and Oligosaccharides
17	Francis Crick Film
18	Molecular Structure and Self-assembly of DNA and RNA
19	Macromolecular Interactions and Protein and Adsorption (Guest Lecturer: Larry Unsworth, Ph.D, National Institute for Nanotechnology) Crystallography (Guest lecturer: Liselotte Kaiser, MIT Center for Biomedical Engineering)
20	DNA Molecular Machines	Take-home midterm exam due
21	Fluorescent Proteins
22	Self-assembling Peptide Systems (Dr. Zhang’s Research)
23	Self-assembling Peptide Systems (Dr. Zhang’s Research) (cont.) Applying Biomimicry to Nanotechnology (Guest Lecture by Andreas Mershin)
24	Research in Biomaterials
25-26	Student Research Activity Presentations