When Timm Maier arrived at Nenad Ban's lab at ETH Zurich in early 2004, he was looking for a project that would push him to his limits. Not long before, ETH's Simon Jenni had obtained well-diffracting crystals of fungal fatty acid synthase, so Maier decided to go after its mammalian analogue.
"It was a funny project," says the German-born protein crystallographer, who completed his PhD at the Free University in Berlin. Since the 1970s, other groups had repeatedly shown that "it was impossible to obtain diffraction-quality crystals," he says.
But Maier needed to jump over another hurdle before he could even start trying to grow crystals: He needed a good source of the protein. "Expression of the molecule is difficult in E. coli," he explains, "and I didn't want to get into decades of trying to clone it and express it."
After pondering the problem ...
