The cells of living organisms are crammed with exquisite macromolecular machinery that carries out the functions of life. The need to understand the operation of these biomolecules on a molecular level grows ever more crucial as medicine develops the technology to tailor drug treatments to control the behavior of specific proteins. Crystallography and vibrational spectroscopy are two experimental approaches that provide information on protein structure and dynamics in sufficient detail to advance understanding of protein function on a molecular level. Traditionally, these are viewed as complementary techniques - each has its own characteristic strengths and weaknesses. The work proposed here aims to exploit the strengths of each, while avoiding some of the limitations, by making full use of polarized infrared (IR) absorbance measurements on protein crystals.
