Courtesy of Syrrx
Crystal mounting and alignment robot developed at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory for use at the Advanced Light Source. Integrated into a synchrotron beamline with intelligent control software, these systems enable fully automated data collection.
The field of protein crystallization is turning heads. Sure, the work generates pictures of subtle beauty, but there's a commercial angle, too, and drug developers have lately come to recognize the potential value of structural genomics. Indeed, deducing protein structure is "a key element for drug discovery," explains Lance Stewart, vice president of the BioStructures division of deCODE Genetics in Reykjavik, Iceland.
With structure in hand, pharmaceutical companies need not rely on guesswork to find promising new drugs. Instead, they can design, in a virtual in silico lab, molecules that will nestle snuggly in the active site of target proteins. Getting to that point, though, will take some doing.
That's because proteins are ...
