The 36th Mid-Atlantic Macromolecular Crystallography Meeting

The 2006 Meeting of the American Crystallographic Association

Item 1: April 2006 Publications by Members:

1: Iwahara J, Clore GM. 
Detecting transient intermediates in macromolecular binding by paramagnetic NMR. 
Nature. 2006 Apr 27;440(7088):1227-30. PMID: 16642002 

2: Yao Y, Mayer ML. 
Characterization of a soluble ligand binding domain of the NMDA receptor regulatory subunit NR3A.
J Neurosci. 2006 Apr 26;26(17):4559-66. PMID: 16641235

3: Kostelansky MS, Sun J, Lee S, Kim J, Ghirlando R, Hierro A, Emr SD, Hurley JH. 
Structural and functional organization of the ESCRT-I trafficking complex. 
Cell. 2006 Apr 7;125(1):113-26. PMID: 16615894 

4: Yamamoto Y, Moore R, Hess HA, Guo GL, Gonzalez FJ, Korach KS, Maronpot RR, Negishi M. 
Estrogen receptor alpha mediates 17alpha -ethynylestradiol-causing hepatotoxicity. 
J Biol Chem. 2006 Apr 10; [Epub ahead of print] PMID: 16606610 

5: Nowotny M, Yang W. 
Stepwise analyses of metal ions in RNase H catalysis from substrate destabilization to product release. 
EMBO J. 2006 May 3;25(9):1924-33. Epub 2006 Apr 6. PMID: 16601679

6: Yang W, Lee JY, Nowotny M. 
Making and breaking nucleic acids: two-Mg2+ion catalysis and substrate specificity.
Mol Cell. 2006 Apr 7;22(1):5-13. PMID: 16600865

7: Prabakaran P, Gan J, Feng Y, Zhu Z, Choudhry V, Xiao X, Ji X, Dimitrov DS. 
Structure of sars coronavirus receptor-binding domain complexed with neutralizing antibody. 
J Biol Chem. 2006 Apr 5; [Epub ahead of print] PMID: 16597622

8: Morizono H, Cabrera-Luque J, Shi D, Gallegos R, Yamaguchi S, Yu X, Allewell NM, Malamy MH, Tuchman M. 
Acetylornithine transcarbamylase: a novel enzyme in arginine biosynthesis. 
J Bacteriol. 2006 Apr;188(8):2974-82. PMID: 16585758

9: Raychaudhuri S, Im YJ, Hurley JH, Prinz WA. 
Nonvesicular sterol movement from plasma membrane to ER requires oxysterol-binding protein-related proteins and phosphoinositides. 
J Cell Biol. 2006 Apr 10;173(1):107-19. Epub 2006 Apr 3. PMID: 16585271

Item 2: Tips and Tricks

Please share your tricks with members of the group. 

Click for Introduction and tips and tricks in Crystallization, Post-crystallization treatments for improving diffraction quality of protein crystals, Derivatization, Diffraction, Symmetry, Structure Solution, Structure Refinement, and Structure Analysis.

Item 3: Topic Discussion - Low Resolution Crystallography

I recently had a visiting seminar speaker in my office, and was describing some of the new structures in the lab to him. I was excited at the time to have the structure of a biggish multiprotein complex and another biggish full-length mammalian signaling protein to show off. The resolution was low in both cases, but for the biological questions being asked about how domains and subunits interacted, the structures were still informative. My visitor commented that “Your lab seems to have a real problem with resolution.”  We have had a recent run of low resolution structures, whether due to bad luck, an increased focus on larger proteins and complexes, or both.

Axel Brünger wrote a review suggesting that this is a larger trend, a renaissance in low resolution crystallography (Brünger, 2005). From a crystallographer’s point of view, it is never a good thing to be stuck with low resolution data. But from a structural biologist’s viewpoint, things look different. The holy grail of the field is an integrated picture of the cell in which structural information is available at every size scale in the cell from atomic resolution crystal structures through light microscopy of whole cells. Our cryo EM colleagues are hard at work improving the resolution of their methods in order to bridge the gap. Low resolution x-ray crystallography also has a big part to play in the chain of imaging techniques as we try to bridge the gap from atomic to cellular structure.

Three examples from my lab follow: ... (Click for the entire article)

Click for previous discussions on: PHASER, HKL2000, Parallel Protein Expression, Structural Genomics, NCS, Missing Atoms, Trends in Crystallography, and Absorption Correction.

Item 4: Dr. Zbigniew Dauter's Lectures at the NIH (03/29-31/2005)