Conveners
Structural biology I
- Bryan Trevor Sewell (University of Cape Town)
The European Synchrotron Radiation Facility (ESRF) has undergone in 2018/2019 a complete replacement of its machine. This upgrade greatly improved the brightness of the X-ray source by decreasing the horizontal emittance and divergence of the storage ring. ESRF-EBS is open in normal users’ operation since August 2020.
The presentation will give an overview of the Structural Biology beamlines...
The literature suggests that the dinitriles: malononitrile and fumaronitrile are substrates of the nitrilase-like enzyme from Pyrococcus abyssi. We have attempted to verify this and to visualize the bound substrates by X-ray crystallography. No nitriles that we tested are hydrolyzed by the very similar nitrilase-like enzymes from either P. abyssi or P. horikoshii. The enzymes do hydrolyse a...
Membrane protein crystals grown by the in meso or lipidic cubic phase (LCP) method generally produce higher-resolution structures, as they have a lower solvent content (type I crystals) than those grown by traditional vapour-diffusion crystallization (type II crystals). To grow LCP crystals of membrane proteins with the synthetic lipid monoolein, the purified membrane protein solution is...
The availability of small molecules able to selectively inhibit specific protein-protein interactions (PPI) in the cell would immensely facilitate our efforts to understand and manipulate the protein-protein “interactome”. In our manuscript we show how a novel approach that combines X-ray crystallography and fragment screening can be used to systematically design protein-protein inhibitors....
Assembly of the mitochondrial respiratory chain requires the coordinated synthesis of mitochondrial and nuclear encoded subunits, redox co-factor acquisition, and correct joining of the subunits to form functional complexes. The conserved Cbp3-Cbp6 chaperone complex binds newly synthesized cytochrome and supports the ordered acquisition of the heme co-factors. Moreover, it functions as a...
