Structural Biology and Interactions

This course is a continuation of the Structural Biochemistry course in S5. Students will learn the basic concepts of the different approaches used for multi-scale structural characterization and macromolecular interaction analysis. The advantages and limitations of all the tools will be highlighted, so that students can understand the complementarity of these tools and know how to use them in an integrative way to answer a given biological question. 

TDs will be a mix of structural analysis applications using visualization tools (such as Pymol) and article analysis using a combination of the approaches studied in CM. Students will then be asked to conceptualize their own experimental project in response to a given problem.

Knowledge :

- Reminder of protein structural levels, interactions, folding and structural motifs.

- Determining the primary structure of proteins by mass spectrometry: bottom-up and top-down proteomics.

- Biophysical techniques for analyzing molecular interactions: basic theoretical concepts and introduction to the different approaches used (fluorescence, thermophoresis, fluorimetry, isothermal titration calorimetry, surface plasmon resonance).

- Low-resolution structural analysis: basic theoretical concepts and introduction to the different approaches used (native mass spectrometry, hydrogen-deuterium exchange, ion mobility, SAXS).

- High-resolution structure determination of macromolecules: basic theoretical concepts and introduction to the different approaches used (crystallography, NMR, electron microscopy).  

Know-how :

- Choose an analysis tool or set of tools to address a structural and/or interactional issue.

- Analyze and interpret data relating to the biophysical approaches studied.

- Select experiments to answer specific questions.

People skills :

- Ability to summarize.

- Being able to work in a group.

Structural Biochemistry S5, Enzymology S5, From Molecules to Cells S1, Biochemistry and Molecular Biology of the Cell S2