User:Proteins

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I'm a professor in the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology at Michigan State University. My laboratory uses computational and experimental methods to study protein structure, and to investigate the molecular forces and events involved in folding and self-assembly.

Although a relative newcomer to wikis, I'm intrigued by their potential for scientific collaboration and as a teaching tool. I'm also impressed by the efforts of the MCB Wikiproject to produce good overview articles.

[edit] 2010 Project to Assign Function(s) to Chloroplast-Targeted Proteins

Along with nine other professors, I'm involved with an NSF-funded 2010 project to assign functions to 4,455 proteins from Arabidopsis thaliana that are nuclear-encoded but putatively targeted to the chloroplast. Here are the tables of the genes that we are studying

We are studying the phenotypes of knockout plants of each of these genes by a variety of experimental probes and also computationally. We would welcome your input in assigning their function(s)!

[edit] Teaching Resources

As part of my teaching, I've been developing public-domain resources for teaching biochemistry, particularly protein science. Some example quiz problems are given here. I've written several hundred such problems and I would be happy to see them used more broadly. I would also appreciate any suggestions for improving them.