• Organisms depend upon molecular signaling to coordinate development, growth, and responses to the environment via changes in protein structure and activity.
• Molecular signaling is a common research interest for an interdisciplinary group of more than 20 WFU faculty members.
• Molecular signaling faculty come from a variety of departments including Biochemistry, Biology, Chemistry, Computer Science, Endocrinology, Health and Exercise Science, Internal Medicine, Mathematics, and Physics. Each brings his or her own disciplinary perspective (neuroscience, biophysics, computer science, biochemistry, physiology, mathematics, and statistics) to the study of signaling.
• We have broadly defined molecular signaling to include the long distance signals that coordinate organismal physiology and behavior (e.g. neurotransmitters and hormones), intracellular signaling molecules and events (second messengers and protein modification including phosphorylation and oxidation), down to the intramolecular conformational changes in proteins that regulate the activity of enzymes, transcription factors, and other molecular motors.

Our interests in molecular signaling range from genetic and genomic to protein function, and organismal physiology. Complete genome (DNA) sequences already exist for the majority of model organisms studied by this group of researchers. Methods to identify changes in gene expression are available at WFU. With the recent award of an NSF Instrumentation Grant to investigators in Biology and Physics, a state-of-the art laser scanning confocal microscope is in place in the Biology Department.  This instrument allows examination of cellular changes in signaling molecules with high temporal and spatial resolution. Furthermore, although studies of the proteome (the suite of proteins produced by any organism), are technically more difficult and intellectually more challenging than genomic studies, as each protein has unique structural and physical properties that change with time, they provide important information not previously available.

Collectively, molecular signaling faculty at WFU study a diverse range of organisms including established model organisms such as Drosophila, E. coli and Arabidopsis, but also focus on humans and unique models, such as honey bees and human blood cells.  Our focus also builds on a pre-existing collaborative research and graduate certificate program in Structural and Computational Biophysics (SCB), which offers students the opportunity to obtain advanced degrees (Ph.D. and M.S.) in a traditional discipline (Physics, Chemistry, Biochemistry, Molecular Biology, Biology, Mathematics, or Computer Science) while receiving broad training in the interdisciplinary field of Structural and Computational Biophysics.

Programmatically, molecular signaling research at Wake Forest University builds on the community created by the success of SCB, but differs from the more biophysical SCB by adding an emphasis on molecular physiology (the science of how organisms work). This shift is not merely semantic, as it permits the inclusion of researchers whose approaches to gene expression and protein function are neither explicitly computational nor biophysical.