Techniques

The overarching goal of the Herschlag Lab is to understand the fundamental behavior of RNA and proteins and, in turn, how these behaviors determine and impact biological catalysis and biology. The lab takes an interdisciplinary approach, spanning and integrating physics, chemistry and biology and a wide range of techniques are employed.

Some of these techniques include:
Pre-steady state kinetics
Single molecule fluorescence & FRET
Organic synthesis of nucleic acid analogs
Single molecule force spectroscopy (laser trap)
Time resolved & static small angle x-ray scattering
NMR
Chemical probing of RNA structure
Chemical & novel probes of RNA dynamics
Fluorescence intensity & anisotropy
X-ray crystallography
Solid phase protein synthesis & Native chemical ligation of proteins
General biochemistry & molecular biology
Computation (Quantum mechanics, molecular dynamics, bioinformatics, etc)
Electron paramagnetic resonance