Based on the comprehensive X-ray crystallography platform established through years of experience, scientists from Creative Biolabs can offer tailored X-ray crystallography services to meet your demands for targets or leads structure determination, fragment-based screening, and other biophysical characterization purposes to help you explore potential drugs.

X-ray crystallography is a useful technique for exploring the atomic and molecular structure of a target crystal, in which the crystalline atoms produce a bunch of X-rays to diffract a number of particular orientations. A crystallographer enables to generate a three-dimensional (3D) drawing of the density of electrons within the crystal, through determining the angles and intensities of these diffracted beams. Based on this electron density, the average positions of the atoms in the crystal can be determined, with their chemical bonds, their disorder as well as a variety of others information. X-ray crystallography has become one of the most favorite tools for structure determination of biological macromolecules and proteins, aiding fragment-based screening. Moreover, the validity of a protein structure is capable of offering a more particular focus for future research.

Figure 1. Structure of mtRNAP  elongation complex determined by X-ray crystallography. (Schwinghammer 2013) Figure 1. Structure of mtRNAP elongation complex determined by X-ray crystallography. (Schwinghammer 2013)

The process of X-ray crystallography

To acquire a three-dimensional molecular structure from a crystal by X-ray crystallography, there are several procedures need to be accomplished. Firstly, a prepared sample at high concentration requires to be crystallized, and the crystals are presented to the X-ray beam. Secondly, the resulting diffraction modes are disposed of, primitively to yield information about the crystal packing symmetry and the size of the repeating unit made up the crystal. This information is got from the pattern of the diffraction spots. Then, the intension of the spots is able to determine the “structure elements” from which a map of the electron density is computed. Finally, the consequent structure is improved to fit the map more precisely and to assume a thermodynamically fond conformation.

X-ray crystallography for biological macromolecular

Crystal structures of proteins started to be worked out in the late 1950s, until now, more than 86817 X-ray crystal structures of proteins, nucleic acids and other biological molecules have been solved. Besides, crystallography is able to solve structures of random large molecules. By contrast, nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectroscopy is limited to solve small ones. Other applications include determining the 3D structure of any fragment hits and filtering fragment hits from virtual screening, HCS, and various biophysical screening approaches bound to the target protein. Creative Biolabs can use X-ray crystallography to explore how a pharmaceutical drug interacts with its protein target, and what variations probably enhance it.

Our scientists are confident in performing high-quality structure determination services by using X-ray crystallography. For more detailed information, please feel free to contact us or directly sent us an inquiry.

References

  1. Smyth M S (2000). “X-Ray crystallography”. Journal of Clinical Pathology 53(1): 8.
  2. Langer G (2008). “Automated macromolecular model building for X-ray crystallography using ARP/wARP version 7”. Nature protocols 3(7): 1171-1179.
  3. Schotte F (2003). “Watching a protein as it functions with 150-ps time-resolved x-ray crystallography”. Science 300(5627): 1944-1947.
  4. Schwinghammer K (2013). “Structure of human mitochondrial RNA polymerase elongation complex”. Nature structural & molecular biology 20(11), 1298-1303.


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