Crystallography limitation

What are the advantages of protein crystallography?
For instance, protein crystallography might help you to understand why a mutation in a protein has a drastic effect.
Alternatively, it can be used to give you information on the active site of an enzyme, allowing you to design molecules, which could target that area of the enzyme and provide the basis for a new drug..
What limits the resolution of crystallography?
In crystals of macromolecules, it is the degree of order in the crystal ("quality of the crystal") that limits the resolution of X-ray crystallography.
Resolution is theoretically limited by the wave length of X-rays (on the order of 1 \xc5), but in practice, the quality of the available crystals determines resolution..
Why do we need crystallography?
Crystallographers can work out the atomic structure of almost anything.
And they use this knowledge to answer why things behave the way they do.
Crystallography reveals why diamonds are hard and shiny and why salt melts in the mouth.
But the technique doesn't just look at naturally-occurring crystals..
For single crystal work, data collection generally will run overnight once a suitable crystal is found.
Workup of the data may take an hour or so.
Once the data is processed, routine structures can be ready to publish in an hour or two.
More difficult structures may take many hours or days.

The requirement for a crystalline sample is one of the most significant restrictions of x-ray crystallography. Especially with biomolecules, crystallizing proteins in the lab can be time-consuming and challenging because most proteins are not naturally crystalline.

Disadvantages of X-ray crystallography include: The sample must be crystallizable. The types of sample that can be analyzed are limited. In particular, membrane proteins and large molecules are difficult to crystallize, due to their large molecular weight and relatively poor solubility.

Can crystallography be performed on ribosomal components?

Crystallography on ribosomal components, as well as ribosomal subunits or whole ribosomes, has been performed for several decades

The limitation here is the need to obtain crystals, but the size of the object is no limitation

The structures of a number of ribosomal proteins and translation factors have been determined

What are the limitations of X-ray crystallography?

“Unfortunately, X-ray crystallography, the gold standard for determining the structure of proteins, has many limitations when dealing with those found in the cellular membrane

” X-ray crystallography is essential for the purpose of designing drugs that efficiently manipulate the function of proteins

Why is crystallography difficult to predict?

The complexity of the crystallography is only loosely correlated with the complexity of the chemistry, so that sometimes quite trivial materials raise complex crystallographic problems, making it difficult to predict with any certainty how long an analysis will take

A new study by chemists at the University of Arkansas shows that X-ray crystallography, the standard method for determining the structure of proteins, can provide inaccurate information about a critical set of proteins—those found in cell membranes. This, in turn, could be leading to poor and inefficient drug design.

Crystallography limitation

What are the advantages of protein crystallography?

What limits the resolution of crystallography?

Why do we need crystallography?

Can crystallography be performed on ribosomal components?

What are the limitations of X-ray crystallography?

Why is crystallography difficult to predict?