The Faculty of the Department participate in a wide spectrum of research activities. At one end of this spectrum are large and medically relevant questions, such as the mechanisms that induce the immune response in humans and the molecular bases of diseases. At the other end are the physical descriptions of simple chemical processes and structures that mimic the behavior of cells or components of cells, such as artificial membranes and synthetically produced small fragments of proteins. The largest part of the departmental research falls between the entirely medical and the entirely molecular, and its objective is to understand how proteins function in catalyzing metabolically important reactions in cells, how signals such as those carried by hormones are transmitted from one cell to another, and how specialized cells such as muscle fibers perform their intended functions