The physical properties of biological macromolecules and the methods used to analyze their structure and function are discussed. Topics covered include: protein architecture, folding and molecular evolution; nucleic acid structure; introduction to structure determination by X-ray crystallography and NMR; biological spectroscopy with emphasis on the biological applications of absorption, fluorescence, NMR, and CD spectroscopies; the kinetics and thermodynamics of protein-ligand interactions; enzyme catalysis; the use of hydrodynamics, chromatography and electrophoresis in the characterization of biological macromolecules; and analysis of biological molecules at the single molecule level. Topics will be illustrated by examples from the research literature.