Protein Structure: Alignment using Mean Field Techniques and Measurement of Isolated Individual Molecules

Techniques originally developed in High Energy Physics have been applied to selected problems in genetics with promising results. First, this talk will briefly review the importance of protein structure from a physics point of view. Then Mean Field Techniques used in detector track fitting algorithms will be applied to the comparison of protein structures. The practical importance of such comparisons will be discussed. Second, the possibility of measuring the charge structure of ''single'' isolated molecules using the proposed SLAC Free Electron Laser will be outlined. This involves the development of an algorithm that determines the orientation of each of the many targeted identical molecules, constructs the 3-D transform from the many 2-D patterns, and finally performs an inverse fourier transform when only the magnitude of the transform is known, since the phase is not measurable.