X-Ray Crystallography

Hot vents in the deep sea are home to microbes that feed on ethane. They were discovered recently from scientists of the Max Planck Institute for Marine Microbiology. Now the researchers from Bremen succeeded in finding an important component in the microbial conversion of the gas. They were able to more

Carbon monoxide is a very poisonous gas. Humans die within minutes when they inhale it. However, some microorganisms tolerate carbon monoxide and even use it to breathe and replicate. Knowledge about how these bacteria survive opens a window into the primeval times of the earth and the origin of lif more

A team led by Oliver Daumke at the MDC has determined the three-dimensional structure of the NatC acetyltransferase in an article published in Nature Communications. This enzyme modifies cell proteins to enable them to perform their functions correctly. In cancer cells, however, NatC is often overac more

by Xuekui Yu, Lei Jin, Jonathan Jih, Chiaho Shih, Z. Hong Zhou The capsid shell of infectious hepatitis B virus (HBV) is composed of 240 copies of a single protein called HBV core antigen (HBc). An atomic model of a core assembled from truncated HBc was determined previously by X-ray crystall more

Despite the prominent role of horizontal gene transfer (HGT) in shaping bacterial metabolism, little is known about the impact of HGT on the evolution of enzyme function. Specifically, what is the influence of a recently acquired gene on the function of an existing gene? For example, certain member more

Abstract Protein‐DNA interactions are essential for many biological processes, X‐ray crystallography can provide high‐resolution structures, but protein‐DNA complexes are difficult to crystallize and typically contain only small DNA fragments. Thus, there is a need for computational methods that more