Manchester, United Kingdom

Structural Biology

Master's
Language: EnglishStudies in English
Subject area: biology
Qualification: MPhil
Kind of studies: part-time studies
Master of Philosophy (MPhil)
University website: www.manchester.ac.uk
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
The ultimate aim of the modern movement in biology is in fact to explain all biology in terms of physics and chemistry.
Francis Crick (1966) Of Molecules and Men. p. 10.
Biology
You can’t fight biology. Only push at the rules, here and there.
David Brin, Glory Season (1993), chapter 5
Biology
No biologist today would think of submitting a paper entitled "New evidence for evolution;" it simply has not been an issue for a century.
Douglas J. Futuyma, Evolutionary Biology, 2nd ed., 1986, Sinauer Associates, p. 15
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