Protein Engineering
Proteins are the ultimate nanomachines, and engineered proteins have important applications in medicine, industry and basic research. UNC has a large community of researchers using both experimental and computational techniques to design a wide variety of proteins including enzymes with new and enhanced activities, antibodies with novel binding properties, and protein switches that can be used to turn on and off signaling pathways in living cells and animals. This work benefits strongly from the excellent infrastructure at UNC for biophysically characterizing proteins (X-ray, NMR and Macromolecular Interaction core facilities), and from tight collaborations with laboratories in the School of Medicine studying disease related pathways.