Advances in medicine depend upon research and technology development at the interfaces of the physical and life sciences. Chemistry is essential to understanding life processes at the molecular level, and new physics-based tools are providing increasingly detailed information about biomolecules and their organization. Most recently, there has been a surge of activity at the biology-chemistry-materials interface (nano-biology) that is promising new drugs, drug delivery systems, diagnostics, and therapeutics. Achieving a predictive understanding of biological systems on every scale (molecules to cells, tissues, organs...) accelerates discovery on each of these frontiers. Predictive understanding only comes with a close union between theory, computation, and experiment. This infrastructure proposal seeks to create a facility that brings together outstanding biological chemistry researchers, both experimentalists and theorists, who are using and advancing computational and physical tools to work at these interfaces. The facility is designed to accommodate a number of individual research groups, and to provide the broader community of NIH researchers with state-of-theart experimental and computational tools. Specifically, the design includes facilities to support: -Mass spectrometry for biomolecular characterization and proteomics; -Optical spectroscopy and chemical imaging of cells, tissue, and single molecules; -X-ray scattering studying biomolecular structures in solution; -Protein biochemistry laboratories for molecular synthesis and reaction mechanism studies; -Theoretical and computational biological chemistry. This powerful set of capabilities, coupled with the Gauss House NMR facilities, will be a cutting-edge interdisciplinary environment for biomedical research in one of the country's leading chemistry departments.
