Question: What exactly is structural biology?

Lizzard O'Day answered on 13 Jun 2011:

I’ll give you wiki’s answer and then mine.

Wiki: Structural biology is a branch of molecular biology, biochemistry, and biophysics concerned with the molecular structure of biological macromolecules, especially proteins and nucleic acids, how they acquire the structures they have, and how alterations in their structures affect their function.

Mine: A picture is worth a thousand words. Structural biology seeks to determine the structure (3-D shape) of biological molecules. Basically we try to take a picture of how something looks in biology and use that info to infer how it works.

For example check out your hair- (do you have split ends?-jk). The main protein in your hair is called keratin- a fibrous protein that depending on it’s structure can give you curly hair (disulfide bonds form between fibers in a specific structure) or straight hair (disulfide bridges are broken and either preventing from reforming or locked in given structure).

On a more disease related application- take HIV. HIV is a RNA virus, that takes over your immune cells and leads to AIDS (autoimmune deficiency syndrome). We as a society would like to stop this- one strategy is to use structural biology to follow the life cycle of the virus- what does it do? who does it talk to? Can we get a glimpse of what HIV is doing in the cell and then try to come up with a clever way to stop it. Say “cheese” HIV.