Protein and Peptide Letters - Volume 23, Issue 3, 2016

Macromolecular crystallography evolved enormously from the pioneering days, when structures were solved by “wizards” performing all complicated procedures almost by hand. In the current situation crystal structures of large systems can be often solved very effectively by various powerful automatic programs in days or hours, or even minutes. Such progress is to a large extent coupled to the advances in many oth Read More

Although macromolecular crystallography is a widely supported technique at synchrotron radiation facilities throughout the world, there are, in comparison, only very few beamlines dedicated to small-molecule crystallography. This limited provision is despite the increasing demand for beamtime from the chemical crystallography community and the ever greater overlap between systems that can be classed as either s Read More

In the field of structural biology, Small Angle X-ray Scattering (SAXS) has undergone a tremendous evolution in the last two decades. From a craft reserved to a few experts in the late 80’s, it has now turned into a high-throughput technique, following the same trend as macromolecular crystallography. Synchrotron radiation has played a key role in this evolution, by providing intense X-ray beams of high optical quality tha Read More

Knowledge of 3D structures of biological molecules plays a major role in both understanding important processes of life and developing pharmaceuticals. Among several methods available for structure determination, macromolecular X-ray powder diffraction (XRPD) has transformed over the past decade from an impossible dream to a respectable method. XRPD can be employed in biosciences for various purposes su Read More

X-ray scattering technique, comprising of small-angle/wide-angle X-ray scattering (SAXS/WAXS) techniques is increasingly used to characterize the structure and interactions of biological macromolecules and their complexes in solution. It is a method of choice to characterize the flexible, partially folded and unfolded protein systems. X-ray scattering is the last resort for proteins that cannot be investigated by crystallograp Read More

Free electron lasers (FELs) provide X-ray pulses in the femtosecond time domain with up to 1012 higher photon flux than synchrotrons and open new avenues for the determination of difficult to crystallize proteins, like large complexes and human membrane proteins. While the X-ray pulses are so strong that they destroy any solid material, the crystals diffract before they are destroyed. The most successful application of FEL Read More

A long-standing desire in biological and biomedical sciences is to be able to probe cellular chemistry as biological processes are happening inside living cells. Synchrotron radiation-based Fourier transform infrared (SR-FTIR) spectral microscopy is a label-free and nondestructive analytical technique that can provide spatiotemporal distributions and relative abundances of biomolecules of a specimen by their characteristic vi Read More

This review describes the use of single crystal UV-Visible Absorption micro-Spectrophotometry (UV-Vis AS) to enhance the design and execution of X-ray crystallography experiments for structural investigations of reaction intermediates of redox active and photosensitive proteins. Considerations for UV-Vis AS measurements at the synchrotron and associated instrumentation are described. UV-Vis AS is useful to veri Read More

Sulfur (S) is an essential macronutrient for all living organisms. A variety of organic and inorganic S species with oxidation states ranging from -2 to +6 exist. Today few spectroscopic and biochemical methods are used to investigate sulfur oxidation state and reactivity in biological samples. X-ray absorption near edge spectroscopy (XANES) is a very well suited spectroscopic technique to probe the oxidation state and the surroundi Read More

The “tender” energy range of 1 to 5 keV, between the energy ranges of most “hard” (>5 keV) and “soft” (<1 keV) synchrotron X-ray facilities, offers some unique opportunities for synchrotron- based X-ray absorption fine structure spectroscopy in life sciences. In particular the K absorption edges of Na through Ca offer opportunities to study local structure, speciation, and chemistry of many important biological compounds, Read More

Synchrotron X-ray Footprinting is a powerful in situ hydroxyl radical labeling method for analysis of protein structure, interactions, folding and conformation change in solution. In this method, water is ionized by high flux density broad band synchrotron X-rays to produce a steady-state concentration of hydroxyl radicals, which then react with solvent accessible side-chains. The resulting stable modification products are a Read More