If they awarded a prize for best seminar title, Zygmunt Derewenda would win it, hand?s down. According to the abstract book for the Keystone Symposium on Structural Genomics, his seminar was to be entitled "Protein Crystallization: From Art to Science." But the University of Virginia researcher decided that was a bit too provocative, so he opted for a more "neutral" title: "Protein Crystallization by Intelligent Design." Derewenda's point, of course, is that crystallization isn?t random but rather stems from a series of procedural decisions, and as this symposium demonstrates, those decisions are getting harder and harder for the average structural biologist to make. Some proteins crystallize easily under standard conditions. But many do not. Over the past two days we?ve heard discussion of a number of strategies for dealing with such proteins, including adding a nucleant, making N- and/or C-terminal truncations, and Derewenda?s strategy, surface engineering. linkurl:Surface engineering;http://nihserver.mbi.ucla.edu/SER/ is an...
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