The Structural and Computational Biology and Biophysics Research Area comprises faculty with interests at the molecular level (that is, at the cellular level and below). Research includes topics such as: determination of protein and nucleic acid structures, the structure and mechanism of protein and RNA enzymes (including proteins involved in cancer), membrane biochemistry and the structure of membrane proteins, structures of macromolecular complexes, study of the structure and mechanism of viruses (including emerging pathogens such as West Nile and Dengue viruses), experimental and computational investigation of macromolecular interactions, regulation of gene expression by epigenetic mechanisms such as chromosomal and nucleosomal structure, the structure and function of plant cell walls and cytoskeleton, response of cells to high salinity stress and genomics, transcriptomics, proteomics, systematics, and computational systems biology and other topics at the interface of experiment and computation. This group uses a wide variety of experimental approaches ranging from X-ray crystallography, NMR, Cryo-electron microscopy, electron tomography, and advanced spectroscopic techniques for examining and determining molecular structures, to computational techniques as they apply to nucleic acid and protein structures, bioinformatics, genomics and systems biology including molecular dynamics, machine learning, and network analysis.