Afternoon with Chemistry or Chemistry Café: HOW PROTEINS EXIST AND HOW WE KNOW IT

The lecture will introduce high school colleagues to the field of knowledge at the interface of chemistry, physics and biology. In the introduction, the lecturer will attempt to clearly describe the repertoire of structural motifs encountered in proteins and summarize the principles that determine the structure and behavior of protein molecules.
The main part of the lecture will present the methods that have provided us with information about protein structures (X-ray crystallography, electron microscopy, nuclear magnetic resonance, computational methods). It will include short demonstrations that introduce the principles of individual methods. The aim of the lecture is to introduce the audience to the field of chemistry, which has experienced rapid development in recent years and in which a high school teacher often cannot rely on what he himself heard as a student.
The main goal is to motivate high school teachers and students to connect knowledge from physics, chemistry, and biology, the connection of which may not be obvious from textbooks, but in practice is the basis for understanding processes in nature.