Tiny crystals could revolutionize structural biology studies

For structural biologists, the first step in determining a protein's precise molecular structure is often the hardest: coaxing the protein to grow into the orderly, three-dimensional crystals that are the starting material for most structural studies. For particularly difficult cases, it can take years to generate usable crystals – and sometimes the protein never crystallizes despite intense effort. Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) scientists have developed a new method that generates a high-resolution protein structure from crystals one-million times smaller than those needed for X-ray crystallography, the most common method for determining protein structure.

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