Argonne Hosts Workshop on Software for Protein Crystallography and Demonstrates the Great Potential of Beamline Facilities at the Department of Energy s Synchrotrons for Rapid, High Throughput Determination of Protein Structures

Summary

In mid November some 70 scientists from the United States and Europe met at the Structural Biology Center (SBC) at the Argonne National Laboratory bringing together top developers of crystallographic software for structural biology. During three days of workshop there were six data collection training sessions using advanced software. The structure of a novel protein was determined as an example of the semi-automated approach to structure determination. Crystals of the protein were used to collect data on the SBC s undulator beamline at the Advanced Photon Source. The necessary data were collected in 20 minutes and processed in near real time. In just two hours the protein structure was determined and refined.