News Archive

Protein crystallography without crystals?

December 2015. Structure determination by protein crystallography is limited by the ability of proteins to crystallize.  Since many proteins cannot be crystallized, high resolution X-ray structure information is often missing. Masato Akutus from the Buchmann Institute of Molecular Life Sciences has won funding from the Volkswagen Stiftung to develop a novel and rapid approach for structure determination by making use of a molecular framework for protein crystallization. If successful this approach would eliminate the need to crystallize proteins in the conventional way but still provide high-resolution structural information. The molecular framework will act like a molecular sieve, which will trap proteins. It should then be possible to determine the structure of the protein in complex with the sieve. Such a new approach would open a universal, easy, fast and low sample consuming approach that would eliminate the biggest hurdle of protein crystallography.

 

Contact:
Masato Akutsu
Buchmann Institute for Molecular Life Sciences
Goethe University Frankfurt
Max von Laue Str. 15
60438 Frankfurt am Main, Germany
akutsu@em.uni-frankfurt.de