Protein Crystals for Structure
Does growing protein crystals in orbit still help drug discovery, and who pays for it?
Chapter summary
sometimes, for difficult proteins.
Key takeaways
- 1
Microgravity can produce larger, more ordered protein crystals that diffract to higher resolution, revealing the shape of drug targets in more detail.
- 2
JAXA has run about two-thirds of all protein crystal growth experiments on the ISS; one study improved the structure of the kinase MAP2K7 to 1.3 ångströms, and work on a protein linked to Duchenne muscular dystrophy contributed to the drug candidate TAS-205, which entered Phase 3 in December 2020.
- 3
But cryo-electron microscopy now determines many structures without crystals, and ground crystallisation keeps improving.
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