The Physics of Biological Systems program in the Department of Physics and Astronomy is a highly interdisciplinary research program that involves the development and application of experimental and theoretical methods to understand biology from a physical perspective. This program is designed to provide the quantitative skills and the biological background for students who would like to pursue careers in fundamental research in biophysics, quantitative biology, and biotechnology. The Physics of Biological Systems research programs involve strong collaborations with faculty members in physics, chemistry, engineering, bioinformatics, and life sciences at Iowa State University. Current research areas include macromolecular structural determination, structural and function of biological membranes, bioinformatics and computational biology.
Faculty

• Kai-Ming Ho
• Alex Travesset
• David Vaknin
• Edward Yu

Ongoing Research
Structure and function of membrane transporters
We currently focus on the structural basis of multi-drug resistance in multi-drug membrane transporters. Multi-drug transporters interfere significantly with cancer chemotherapy and the treatment of bacterial infections, by recognizing a number of structurally unrelated toxic compounds and actively extruding them from cells. Our long-term goal is to elucidate the structures and fundamental mechanisms that give rise to multiple drug recognition and extrusion in these multi-drug transporters. Using X-ray crystallography and site-directed mutagenesis, we study the structural and functional relationship of the Escherichia oli AcrB transmembrane efflux pump, which shows the widest substrate specificity among all known multi-drug transporters, ranging from most of the currently used antibiotics, disinfectants, dyes, detergents, to simple solvents. This information is expected to help in the redesign of old drugs and the development of new drugs as well as combinations of two or more drugs for greater effect.