Bruce Luxon, Ph.D., Professor
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Hierarchical
clustering of several chemokines using aglomerative nesting to
search for hidden patterns in differential gene expression as
measure by microarrays.
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Our major areas of interest are Bioinformatics and Computational Biology. We are particularly active in the determination of biomolecular solution structures using multidimensional NMR, including DNA, DNA-drug complexes, proteins and protein-DNA complexes. We also do a considerable amount of work on antisense biotherapeutics with emphasis on the targeted delivery of dithioate-modified oligonucleotides into specific cell types. These efforts will help provide insight into the mechanisms of cancer and AIDS (as well as other diseases) and the design of sequence-specific anticancer, antiviral and antibiotic nucleic acid binding drugs. We are also particularly interested in protein-DNA recognition motifs and their dynamical interactions.
Another active area of research is in the development of computer software tools to push the state of the art in hybrid relaxation matrix analysis of multidimensional NMR data for molecular structural determinations. While we continue the refinement of the MORASS 2D NMR complete relaxation matrix program suite, a new project is the development of a 3D Hybrid Hybrid matrix methodology to refine larger (>15,000 Dalton) biomolecules using 3D NOE-NOE Spectroscopy.
In our studies we routinely perform ab initio molecular orbital, molecular dynamics/mechanics and perturbational free energy calculations and create state-of-the-art molecular graphics. We have been particularly active in developing World Wide Web tools for the interactive manipulation and dissemination of NMR and structural biological data and information.
