Determining Big Protein Structure

摘要

Protein structures provide a crucial source of information for understanding protein function at the molecular level, knowledge important for structure-based drug design and protein engineering. Nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectroscopy represents the only technique currently available that can characterise the structures of proteins incapable of crystallisation at atomic resolution. However, it has a size limitation because larger molecules have weaker signals and more complicated spectra. NMR has determined about 15% of protein structures solved to date, but only 1% of the NMR structures and global folds cover proteins with a molecular mass greater than 25kDa (1kDa = MW 1000).