The overall objective of our research is to understand subcellular structure and the control of macromolecular assembly.
Viruses interact with cell surface receptors and find their way into the cytoplasm of the nucleus.
Our analysis of the structural basis for such recognition and localization events uses the virus structures as starting points. The recognition by proteins of specific DNA sequences is a fundamental event in the control of gene expression. We study this recognition by examining crystals of complexes between such regulatory proteins and the DNA sites to which they bind. Specific protein associations occur in response to defined events at the cell surface. For example, tyrosine kinases participate in many signal transduction pathways by generating phosphorylated sites for binding of other proteins.