Research in this graduate focus area spans the areas of structural biology, bioinformatics, ion channels, membrane transport, metallobiochemistry, optical biology, crystallography and protein folding. The research groups within this focus are actively involved in the area of investigating molecular function with the aid of high-resolution techniques. The tools used here vary among the breadth of established biophysical techniques.

State-of-the-art instrumentation is available for structural biology and molecular biophysics studies.  This includes a Rigaku 007 rotating anode CCD system for x-ray data collection, continually updated crystallographic and modeling software, and regular access to synchrotron x-ray data collection facilities.  Crystallization robots are available via collaboration. Laboratories maintain state-of-the-art 3D-graphics workstations and computing servers and have free access to campus-wide computing servers and clusters.  The UCI Biomolecular NMR facility includes a Varian Inova 800 MHz NMR spectrometer; NMR hardware is available for both liquid, semi-solid and solid-state samples.  A Biacore 3000 (SPR) instrument is installed in a dedicated spectroscopy room and is available to the UCI community.  Further instrumentation includes atomic force microscopy (AFM), dynamic light scattering (DLS), a Jasco J-720 circular dichroism (CD) spectropolarimeter, MSC titration calorimeter (ITC), a Microcal VP-DSC scanning calorimeter and differential scanning fluorimetry (DSF).