Joint Research Group Macromolecular Crystallography
A tutorial for learning and teaching macromolecular crystallography
Authors
Annette Faust a), Sandra Puehringerb), Nora Darowskib), Santosh Panjikar c), Venkataraman Parthasarathy c), Andrea Schmidt c), Victor S. Lamzin c), Kay Diederichsd), Uwe Mueller b) and Manfred S. Weiss b)
a) Center for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, Christian-Albrechts-University Kiel, Am Botanischen Garten 9, D-24118 Kiel, Germany.
b) BESSY-MX group, Helmholtz-Zentrum für Materialien und Energie, BESSYII, Albert-Einstein-Str. 15, Berlin, Germany.
c) EMBL Hamburg Outstation, c/o DESY, Notkestr. 85, D-22603 Hamburg, Germany. D-14109 Berlin, Germany.
d) Department of Biology, University of Konstanz, Box M647, D-78457 Konstanz, Germany.
Introduction
Seven experiments have been designed to be used for teaching macromolecular crystallography. They are based on three proteins, which are all commercially available and which can be easily and reproducibly crystallized and mounted for diffraction data collection. The seven experiments are:
- Sulphur-SAD structure determination of cubic insulin
- Bromide-MAD structure determination of thaumatin
- Structure determination by molecular replacement using monoclinic lysozyme
- Identification of bound solvent ions in lysozyme using a longer wavelength data set
- Identification of a weakly bound ligand in the active site of lysozyme
- SIRAS on tetragonal lysozyme
- UV-RIP on thaumatin
For each of the seven experiments a complete and detailed tutorial is available for download which describes all the steps from crystallization, to crystal mounting, diffraction data collection, data processing and structure solution using Auto Rickshaw. Also the raw diffraction images and the processed data of a sample diffraction data set as well as the structure solution process and the refined coordinates and phases are provided for teaching and demonstration.
How to download and use the Tutorial
The complete tutorial consists of about 16 GB of data, which have been divided conveniently into 54 gzipped tar-archive files. Detailed download instructions can be found here.