| Lec # | Topics | KEY DATES |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Important Role of Water Molecule, Hydration of Amino Acids, Protein and Other Biological Materials | |
| 2 | Amino Acids: Their Chemical and Physical Properties Influence of Ionic Strength, pH, etc. | |
| 3 | Primary and Secondary Structures of Proteins Dihedral Angles, Peptide Bonds, Planar Structure, Relationship and Propensity of Amino Acid Sequence, Secondary Structure Ramachandran Plot | |
| 4 | Alpha-helices, 310 Helix, pi Helix, Beta-helices, etc. Variation of Helices and Their Helical Bundles, Two Strand Coiled-coils, Three or Four Strand Coiled-coils, Supercoils Various Helical Rich Protein Structure Models Alpha-helices in Biological Materials | |
| 5 | Helical Coiled-coils Two-, Three-, Four- Stranded Helical Bundles Applying Coiled-coils to Nanomaterials, Molecular Springs, Switches, etc. | |
| 6 | Beta Sheets: Antiparallel, Parallel, and Twist Beta Sheet Rich Proteins Beta Sheets in Biological Materials | |
| 7 | Practical Aspects of Single Crystal X-ray Crystallography, Part 1 X-ray Single Crystal Diffraction, Fiber Diffraction Preparation of the Samples for Diffraction Analyses | |
| 8 | NMR (Guest Lecturer: Peter Carr, MIT Media Lab) | |
| 9 | Practical Aspects of Single Crystal X-ray Crystallography, Part 2 | |
| 10 | Analytical Approaches and Instrumentation (Guest Lecturer: Sotirus Koutsopoulos, Ph.D) | |
| 11 | Silk | Take-home midterm exam out |
| 12 | Biomineralization: Sea Creatures | |
| 13 | Biomineralization: Bones and Teeth | |
| 14 | Bioadhesives | |
| 15 | Lipids as Building Materials | |
| 16 | Polysaccharides and Oligosaccharides | |
| 17 | Francis Crick Film | |
| 18 | Molecular Structure and Self-assembly of DNA and RNA | |
| 19 | Macromolecular Interactions and Protein and Adsorption (Guest Lecturer: Larry Unsworth, Ph.D, National Institute for Nanotechnology) Crystallography (Guest lecturer: Liselotte Kaiser, MIT Center for Biomedical Engineering) | |
| 20 | DNA Molecular Machines | Take-home midterm exam due |
| 21 | Fluorescent Proteins | |
| 22 | Self-assembling Peptide Systems (Dr. Zhang's Research) | |
| 23 | Self-assembling Peptide Systems (Dr. Zhang's Research) (cont.) Applying Biomimicry to Nanotechnology (Guest Lecture by Andreas Mershin) | |
| 24 | Research in Biomaterials | |
| 25-26 | Student Research Activity Presentations |