Brno, Czech Republic

Structural Biology

Language: English Studies in English
Subject area: biology
University website: www.mendelu.cz
Years of study: 4
Biology
Biology is the natural science that involves the study of life and living organisms, including their physical structure, chemical composition, function, development and evolution. Modern biology is a vast field, composed of many branches. Despite the broad scope and the complexity of the science, there are certain unifying concepts that consolidate it into a single, coherent field. Biology recognizes the cell as the basic unit of life, genes as the basic unit of heredity, and evolution as the engine that propels the creation of new species. Living organisms are open systems that survive by transforming energy and decreasing their local entropy to maintain a stable and vital condition defined as homeostasis. See glossary of biology.
Structural Biology
Structural biology is a branch of molecular biology, biochemistry, and biophysics concerned with the molecular structure of biological macromolecules (especially proteins, made up of amino acids, and RNA or DNA, made up of nucleic acids), how they acquire the structures they have, and how alterations in their structures affect their function. This subject is of great interest to biologists because macromolecules carry out most of the functions of cells, and it is only by coiling into specific three-dimensional shapes that they are able to perform these functions. This architecture, the "tertiary structure" of molecules, depends in a complicated way on each molecule's basic composition, or "primary structure."
Biology
Today, the central and still fascinating questions for biologists concern the mechanisms by which evolution occurs."
Helena Curtis and N. Sue Barnes, Biology 5th ed. 1989, Worth Publishers, p. 972
Biology
Purpose has no place in biology, but history has no meaning without it.
George Kubler The Shape of Time, 1982, p. 8
Biology
Today, nearly all biologists acknowledge that evolution is a fact.
Neil A. Campbell, Biology 2nd ed., 1990, Benjamin/Cummings, p. 434
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