The 36th Mid-Atlantic Macromolecular Crystallography Meeting

The 2006 Meeting of the American Crystallographic Association

Item 1: March 2006 Publications by Members:

 1: Yang W. 
Poor base stacking at DNA lesions may initiate recognition by many repair proteins. 
DNA Repair (Amst). 2006 Mar 27; PMID: 16574501

2: Mayer ML. 
Glutamate receptors at atomic resolution. 
Nature. 2006 Mar 23;440(7083):456-62. PMID: 16554805 

3: Mayer ML, Ghosal A, Dolman NP, Jane DE. 
Crystal structures of the kainate receptor GluR5 ligand binding core dimer with novel GluR5-selective antagonists. 
J Neurosci. 2006 Mar 15;26(11):2852-61. PMID: 16540562

4: Gustchina A, Jaskolski M, Wlodawer A.
Lessons learned fighting HIV can be applied to anti-cancer drug design. 
Cell Cycle. 2006 Mar;5(5):463-4. Epub 2006 Mar 1. No abstract available. PMID: 16479175

Item 2: Tips and Tricks

Please share your tricks with members of the group. 

Click for Introduction and tips and tricks in Crystallization, Post-crystallization treatments for improving diffraction quality of protein crystals, Derivatization, Diffraction, Symmetry, Structure Solution, Structure Refinement, and Structure Analysis.

Item 3: Topic Discussion - Low Resolution Crystallography

I recently had a visiting seminar speaker in my office, and was describing some of the new structures in the lab to him. I was excited at the time to have the structure of a biggish multiprotein complex and another biggish full-length mammalian signaling protein to show off. The resolution was low in both cases, but for the biological questions being asked about how domains and subunits interacted, the structures were still informative. My visitor commented that “Your lab seems to have a real problem with resolution.”  We have had a recent run of low resolution structures, whether due to bad luck, an increased focus on larger proteins and complexes, or both.

Axel Brünger wrote a review suggesting that this is a larger trend, a renaissance in low resolution crystallography (Brünger, 2005). From a crystallographer’s point of view, it is never a good thing to be stuck with low resolution data. But from a structural biologist’s viewpoint, things look different. The holy grail of the field is an integrated picture of the cell in which structural information is available at every size scale in the cell from atomic resolution crystal structures through light microscopy of whole cells. Our cryo EM colleagues are hard at work improving the resolution of their methods in order to bridge the gap. Low resolution x-ray crystallography also has a big part to play in the chain of imaging techniques as we try to bridge the gap from atomic to cellular structure.

Three examples from my lab follow: ... (Click for the entire article)

Click for previous discussions on: PHASER, HKL2000, Parallel Protein Expression, Structural Genomics, NCS, Missing Atoms, Trends in Crystallography, and Absorption Correction.

Item 4: Dr. Zbigniew Dauter's Lectures at the NIH (03/29-31/2005)