DCMB faculty employ and develop experimental and informatics approaches to understand the structure, function, and interaction of proteins - which are the building blocks of biological systems, the molecular motors, switches, catalysts and transporters. We also investigate implications for human diseases when normal protein functions go awry.

• Building on traditional studies of protein structure and function, DCMB faculty use bioinformatics and proteomics approaches to predict protein structure from amino acid sequences, and predict protein function from structure
• They also use experimental approaches to measure, and use simulations and mathematical modeling to predict, protein interactions in regulatory networks (Freddolino)
• Applying our understanding of protein structure and function to clinical research, they use informatics tools, simulation and modeling to facilitate drug discovery and design
• Use proteomics and informatics tools to analyze post-translation modification and study the role of differential expression of alternative splice isoforms of proteins and transcripts in cancer-related pathways (Omenn)
• Our faculty members also develop computational methods to process and extract biological information from complex proteomic datasets (Nesvizhskii)