Proteins carry out virtually all of life s essential functions through chemical reactions.
The grant will fund the first year of a five-year pilot program that is expected to determine several hundred protein structures from humans and model organisms ranging from bacteria to the fruit fly. The goal of this project is to understand how a protein works normally, how a faulty structure can cause disease, and how to develop a means of successfully treating that disease. Determining the structure of specific proteins that are relevant to specific diseases will help scientists design drugs to treat those conditions, explained Dr. Mark R. Chance, the consortium s principal investigator at Einstein. Director of the College s Center for Synchrotron Biosciences, he is the Joseph and Anne L. Wunsch Fellow in Biophysical Engineering. The Einstein Center for Synchrotron Biosciences, a shared resource facility at the National Synchrotron Light Source at Brookhaven National Laboratory, facilitates the study of the structure and function of the living cell using extremely high flux and high brightness electromagnetic radiation and energies ranging from the infrared through the ultraviolet.