Easier Way to Convert Proteins into Crystals

Roland Piquepaille writes "As you might know, proteins need to be transformed into 3-D crystals before their atomic structures and their properties can be analyzed. And production of high quality crystals from proteins has been a difficult task until now. But scientists in the U.K. have successfully used a porous medium, or 'nucleant,' a material that encourages protein molecules to crystallize. Their first step towards 'holy grail' of crystallography could help speed up the development of new medicines and treatments."

An Even Easier Way to Convert Proteins to Crystals

[digitaldc]

Drink lots of beer and then pee in the snow.

More importantly...

[cryptochrome]

By speeding up the (currently extremely tedious) process of crystallization and hopefully making inroads into the ~70% of all protein which currently can't be crystallized, this will rapidly improve our understanding of the structures of whole classes of proteins.

This should impact future graduate students

[radiashun]

Hopefully this will encourage more individuals to pursue advanced degrees in protein crystallography. I was recently at a talk where a soon-to-be PhD was discussing her crystallography work. She said that many people choose to pursue other areas in biochemistry/structural biology because protein crystallography is very unpredictable. Some proteins will crystallize in months while others can take YEARS! Waiting years before you can really dive into your PhD research is very discouraging.