Abstract

Investigating how proteins/enzymes interact and function is central to our understanding of cellular processes that are all too often defective in human diseases. Structural biology allows us to analyse these interactions, sometimes at atomic resolution, and to dissect complicated biological processes. Our experimentally derived models serve as a platform from predicting drug-binding sites to understanding key mutations that disrupt an important biological pathway. The term “structural biology” represents many complementary and technically challenging techniques, which often requires critical analysis of our models and requires further biochemical and biophysical techniques for validation. I shall discuss what we can learn with these models in the context of my research into understanding how post-translational modification of proteins by a small protein, ubiquitin, is an important signal during the inflammatory response.