Departments and Research Centers

• Department of Molecular Biosciences
• Robert H. Lurie Comprehensive Cancer Center
• Center for Structural Biology
• Center for Genetic Medicine

Academic Programs

• Interdepartmental Biological Sciences (IBiS) Program: The primary doctoral program for the Molecular Biosciences department.
• Medical Scientist Training Program (MSTP): The primary graduate program for students intending to become physician-scientists.
• Program in Biological Sciences (PBS): The undergraduate program serving biology majors at Northwestern.
• Masters Program in Quantitative Systems Biology (QSB): A Masters program serving quantitatively inclined graduate students at Northwestern.

Pre-doctoral Training Programs

• Molecular Biophysics Training Program
• Cell and Molecular Basis of Disease Training Program
• Chemistry of Life Processes Training Program

Facilities

• IMSERC NMR Instruments: The IMSERC NMR facility houses a brand new five-channel 600 MHz Bruker NEO instrument equipped with a cryogenic probe. The facility is staffed by a full-time manager. Virtuall all the experiments for studies of protein structure and dynamics undertaken thus far by the Radhakrishnan lab has used a 600 MHz instrument.
• UIC Center for Structural Biology: A super high-field resource comprising 800 and 900 MHz spectrometers for structural biologists in the Chicago area.
• Keck Biophysics Facility: The Keck Biophysics Facility hosts a wide array of spectroscopic, imaging, and analytical instruments for biophysical studies of macromolecules and macromolecular interactions. Over two dozen instruments are currently available and the facility is open to investigators from within as well as outside Northwestern. Virtually every project in the lab takes advantage of this valuable resource.
• IMSERC Facility: The IMSERC Facility hosts a wide array of analytical instruments for chemistry and biochemistry research. Besides NMR instruments, we use the facility mostly for mass spectrometric analysis (ESI-MS and MALDI).
• Structural Biology Facility : The Structural Biology Facility provides Northwestern structural biologists with access to the brightest source in the world for crystallographic analysis at the Advanced Photon Source and also hosts premier electron cryomicroscopy (cryoEM) resources for structure determination of biological macromolecules/macromolecular complexes on the Evanston campus.
  

DATABASES

• Entrez: NCBI's integrated data retrieval system
• UniProt: Curated database of protein sequences
• Prosite: Compilation of protein families and domains
• RCSB PDB: RCSB's biomolecular structure database
  
• The Molcular Biology Database Collection: A compilation of online databases
• ACEDB: A Caenorhabditis elegans database
• SGD: Saccharomyces genome database
• Ensembl: A browser for a variety of genomes
  
• Flybase: A database of the Drosophila genome

TOOLS

• MONSTER: A webserver for analyzing macromolecular complexes developed in our laboratory
• BLAST: A suite of tools for identifying homologous sequences
• CLUSTAL W: A tool for aligning multiple sequences
• ScanProsite: A tool for detecting PROSITE patterns
• ProfileScan: A tool for detecting remote homologues
• Pfam: A tool for detecting remote homologues
• ExPaSy: Proteomics server of the Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics
• PHYLIP: Phylogenetic analysis suite
• GENSCAN: A gene prediction tool
• PredictProtein: Burkhard Rost's PHD suite for secondary structure prediction and other programs
• JPred: A yet another tool for secondary structure prediction

FREEWARE

• RASMOL: Molecular graphics software for Macs, PCs, and Unix boxes (tutorial)
  
• Swiss-PDBViewer: Molecular graphics software for protein structure analysis and modeling (tutorial)
  
• RIBBONS: Molecular graphics software for making pretty images (manual)
• MOLSCRIPT: Molecular graphics software for making pretty images (manual)
  
• RASTER3D: Molecular graphics software for making pretty images - used in conjunction with MOLSCRIPT (manual)
• GRASP: Molecular graphics software for making pretty images (primer)