Principles of Macromolecular Structure: Protein Folding, Structure and Design

This course is taught from the scientific literature. We begin the semester with several classic papers on protein folding. As the semester progresses, we read about protein structure, stability, and folding pathways. The latter part of the semester focuses on recent papers describing new research aimed toward the construction of novel proteins from "scratch." These papers cover topics ranging from evolution in vitro to computational and rational design. The course ends by discussing the possibility of creating artificial proteomes in the laboratory, and further steps toward synthetic biology.