Figure: Gaetano Montelione and Yuanpeng Huang of Rutgers UniversityX-ray crystal structure of human basic fibroblast growth factor. With a bit of luck and sometimes decades of dedication, scientists have in recent years revealed fascinating vistas of biological structures at the atomic level using X-ray crystallography and nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectroscopy. In 1997, Timothy Richmond, a professor of X-ray crystallography at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, completed an 18-year undertaking that produced one of the largest structures yet, that of the nucleosome.1 In 1998, after several years of painstaking work, Rockefeller University investigator Roderick MacKinnon, a 1999 Lasker Award winner, pulled off the incredibly tricky--some might say unlikely--feat of using X-ray crystallography to obtain a "snapshot" of a potassium channel, one of those purported "Holy Grails" of neuroscience.2 But in the wake of the Human Genome Project (HGP), structural genomics has become the focus, and more and ...
Proteomics Factories
Figure: Gaetano Montelione and Yuanpeng Huang of Rutgers UniversityX-ray crystal structure of human basic fibroblast growth factor. With a bit of luck and sometimes decades of dedication, scientists have in recent years revealed fascinating vistas of biological structures at the atomic level using X-ray crystallography and nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectroscopy. In 1997, Timothy Richmond, a professor of X-ray crystallography at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, complete
Written byEugene Russo
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