Modern protein crystallography

Modern drug and especially antibiotic development is impossible without prior knowledge of the structure of vital bacterial enzymes to be knocked out during proposed treatment. The structure of these proteins should be determined with atomic resolution, i.e. the position of each non-hydrogen atoms should be defined precisely. Only such detailed knowledges of these enzyme structures allow us to predict their mechanism of catalysis and subsequently the structure of the most efficient inhibitors.
The technique of the protein crystallography was developed during the last few decades. At the beginning this method of structure development was reasonably slow due to very poor experimental equipment. Nowadays the enormous development of computer techniques allows determining with high accuracy the structure of very large protein molecules and even the structures of simple viruses. For example, modern x-ray detectors generates up to 35 Mb of data per second. Currently, only the latest computers can store such information in real time. Complete data set from one crystal in this case can be up to hundreds Gb. Processing of such amount of data it is another very difficult and time consuming task.
Last decade the large amount of software for protein crystallography were developed. One of the well known x-ray crystallography program complex is CCP4. This is not a single program; this is a set of programs written by many scientists and the central committee only responsible for general of standardization of interface and data formats. Furthermore all developers of this program complex organize annual meeting with users and run online CCP4 bulletin board or ccp4bb, where everybody can solve their scientific problems.
.As a conclusion it is important to note that despite that protein crystallography is more than 60 year old the, this scientific area have many unsolved problems, such as protein crystallization, protein structure etc., and it is very interesting and perspective area of science for young biologist, chemist and physicist.
This article is written on the basis on information from proteincrystallography.org web site.