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