The underlying question here “How do Proteins Work?” On a more down-to-earth level, our day to day work is concerned with answering questions related to the possibility of observing particular biophysical properties. We have made great progress in this area very recently and were among the very first groups to use micro-crystalline preparations for solid-state NMR: this is an extremely dynamic area for the future, with the perspective of complete structural and dynamic characterization of biologically relevant proteins. So far our work has concentrated on questions such as how can we see water-protein interactions? how can we measure protein dynamics in the solid state? or how can we determine the electronic distributions in the active sites of paramagnetic metallo-enzymes?
