Crystallography setup

In order to do Protein Crystallography, you first and foremost need to have a crystal to analyse

To get your crystals, it’s a numbers game, you mix the target protein with hundreds of different chemical cocktails, in the hope that one or more of these will give you a crystal

In crystallography, you have to “focus” the image in silico

We do this by measuring all the spots on the diffraction patterns, and the computer software converts these into a 3D image of your protein

All the atoms in a molecule are surrounded by a cloud of electrons, which effectively define its shape

As the name suggests, the platform mainly uses X-ray crystallography to resolve the structures of proteins, but recently, with the help of the Bioimaging platform, we have started to use the technique of cryoelectron microscopy as well