Abstract
Since the Protein Data Bank (PDB) was founded in 1971, there are now over 120,000 depositions, the majority of which are from X-ray crystallography and 90% of those made use of synchrotron beamlines. At the Cambridge Structure Database (CSD), founded in 1965, there are more than 800,000 ‘small molecule’ crystal structure depositions and a very large number of those are relevant in the biosciences as ligands or cofactors. The technology for crystal structure analysis is still developing rapidly both at synchrotrons and in home labs. Determination of the details of the hydrogen atoms in biological macromolecules is well served using neutrons as probe. Large multi-macromolecular complexes cause major challenges to crystallization; electrons as probes offer unique advantages here. Methods developments naturally accompany technology change, mainly incremental but some, such as the tuneability, intensity and collimation of synchrotron radiation, have effected radical changes in capability of biological crystallography. In the past few years, the X-ray laser has taken X-ray crystallography measurement times into the femtosecond range. In terms of applications many new discoveries have been made in the molecular biosciences. The scope of crystallographic techniques is indeed very wide. As examples, new insights into chemical catalysis of enzymes and relating ligand bound structures to thermodynamics have been gained but predictive power is seen as not yet achieved. Metal complexes are also an emerging theme for biomedicine applications. Our studies of coloration of live and cooked lobsters proved to be an unexpected favourite with the public and schoolchildren. More generally, public understanding of the biosciences and crystallography’s role within the field have been greatly enhanced by the United Nations International Year of Crystallography coordinated by the International Union of Crystallography. This topical review describes each of these areas along with illustrative results to document the scope of each methodology.
Highlights
To first set a historical context, of especial significance is that the Protein Data Bank (PDB) was launched nearly five decades ago by the Cambridge Structure Database (CSD) and the Brookhaven National Laboratory [1] and which has more than 120,000 depositions
The working of single crystal structure determination increasingly alongside cryoelectron microscopy is a major trend of researchers in structural biology
The technology of X-ray sources is advancing strongly entering a fourth generation of extremely brilliant synchrotron sources and a second generation of X-ray lasers; sample sizes reaching the single molecule size are an X-ray laser facility objective
Summary
To first set a historical context, of especial significance is that the Protein Data Bank (PDB) was launched nearly five decades ago (in 1971) by the Cambridge Structure Database (CSD) and the Brookhaven National Laboratory [1] and which has more than 120,000 depositions. A major advance in biological chemistry has been the application of synchrotron radiation to determine biological crystal structures at atomic resolution to give as clear details as possible of reactants c 2017 The Author(s) They cooperated together, and in partnership with Hauptman-Woodward Medical Research Institute, established the Industrial Macromolecular Crystallographic Association (IMCA) which includes its own dedicated Collaborative Access Team beamlines at the U.S.A.’s Advanced Photon Source (APS) (https://www.imca.aps.anl.gov/) for ligand discovery towards new drugs In another example of Pharma collaboration, the Structural Genomics Consortium (SGC) is a not-for-profit organization formed in 2004 to determine the 3D structures of proteins of medical relevance and place them in the PDB without restriction on use. There are female crystallographers up to Nobel Prize winner level with Dorothy Hodgkin (Nobel Prize in Chemistry 1964) and Ada Yonath (Nobel Prize in Chemistry, shared, 2009)
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