Scientific Research Division

Life Science Group

The research interests of life science are:

(1) Synchrotron X-ray protein crystallography, molecular biophysics, structural biology and proteomics (Dr. Chun-Jung Chen). The major research is to study crystal structure and functional relationship of various proteins, including metalloproteins, virus, membrane proteins, enzymes, protein-DNA/RNA complex, and functional important proteins related to drug discovery by Protein Crystallography, X-ray Absorption Fine Structure (XAFS), Circular Dichroism (CD) and Small Angle X-ray Scattering (SAXS). (2) To develop high-resolution microscopic techniques for revealing detailed structures of biological samples (Dr. Su-Yu Chiang). We have implemented a structured illumination (SI) based fluorescence imaging system to provide doubled resolution than the diffraction limit. Now, we are working on the developments of coherent SI imaging for native samples without labelling fluorophores and correlated SI-fluorescence microscopy (SIFM) with soft x-ray tomography at Taiwan photon source (TPS) for bio-medical research. (3) The membrane biophysics and related biology including protein-membrane interaction, drug-membrane interaction and bio-materials (Dr. Ming-Tao Lee). Highlights of our research include developing the X-ray scattering/diffraction methods for membrane structures and the method of giant uniamellar vesicles (GUVs) on the interactions between bio-molecules and membranes.