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A powder X-ray diffractometer in motion. X-ray crystallography is the experimental science of determining the atomic and molecular structure of a crystal, in which the crystalline structure causes a beam of incident X-rays to diffract in specific directions.
Experimental approaches of determining the structure of nucleic acids, such as RNA and DNA, can be largely classified into biophysical and biochemical methods. Biophysical methods use the fundamental physical properties of molecules for structure determination, including X-ray crystallography, NMR and cryo-EM.
A drawback of NMR crystallography is that the method is typically more time-consuming and more expensive (due to spectrometer costs and isotope labelling) than X-ray crystallography, it often elucidates only part of the structure, and isotope labelling and experiments may have to be tailored to obtain key structural information.
A common goal of these investigations is to obtain high resolution 3-dimensional structures of the protein, similar to what can be achieved by X-ray crystallography. In contrast to X-ray crystallography, NMR spectroscopy is usually limited to proteins smaller than 35 kDa, although larger structures have been solved. NMR spectroscopy is often ...
A set of conformations, determined by NMR or X-ray crystallography may be a better representation of the experimental data of a protein than a unique conformation. [23] The utility of a model will be given, at least in part, by the degree of accuracy and precision of the model.
Specifically, ligand-NMR, mass spectrometry, and X-ray crystallography are commonly used techniques in the drug discovery process. For example, researchers have used structural biology to better understand Met , a protein encoded by a protooncogene that is an important drug target in cancer . [ 25 ]
The first of these is by X-ray crystallography, starting in 1958 when the crystal structure of myoglobin was determined. The second method is by NMR, which began in the 1980s when Kurt Wüthrich outlined the framework for NMR structure determination of proteins and solved the structure of small globular proteins. [5]
Crystallography is a technique that characterizes the chemical structure of materials at the atomic level by analyzing the diffraction patterns of electromagnetic radiation or particles that have been deflected by atoms in the material. X-rays are most commonly used. From the raw data, the relative placement of atoms in space may be determined.