Welcome to the Institute of Structural & Molecular Biology

Octaheme Tetrathionate Reductase (OTR)

ISMB studies the structural nature and impact of biomolecules from details of their atomic structure, through their assembly into larger scale molecular machines on up to studying the large scale effects of these molecular assemblies. ISMB contains groups investigating molecular structure using techniques such as biomolecular nuclear magnetic resonance, X-ray crystallography and computational structure prediction, as well as the full panoply of methods for protein production and biological characterisation. This diverse structural information is often combined with various other physical methods to comprehensively characterise biomolecules of interest to the pharmaceutical and food industries. The range of molecules studied is large, ranging from cell cycle control, cytoskeletal construction, electron transfer, control/implementation of biosynthetic pathways, molecules implicated in the import, export and persistence of bacterial cells within host cells, and with links to the Centre for Structures at Extreme Conditions (CSEC) we are interested in the mechanisms by which biomolecules survive in conditions that would normally lead to their destruction.