Macromolecular Crystallography I: Advanced Experimental Techniques for Getting the Best Data from Difficult Samples

This is a half-day workshop with six invited speakers, who will give an overview of potential problems and numerous techniques which can be applied for solving difficult crystallographic structures. It can take many years of gluering hard work to solve structures, though a number of technological advances have facilitated crystal structure determination in recent years. Difficulties are often encountered due to biochemical nature of the protein and data processing software. The final structure is only as good as the quality of raw data recorded by a specific set of hardware and software.

To address the difficulty level of structure solution there will be a presentation about a specific biological system and the applied experimental approaches, combining different X-ray techniques. Another talk will point out how certain software package could be optimally used on beamlines in order to understand the crystallographic difficulties on protein samples as soon as possible, still in the initial stages of the data collection.

This workshop also provides essential topics for successful synchrotron protein crystallography studies, including automation of data collection and sample handling, x-ray detector technologies and beamline hardware design.

Tentative Schedule: Friday, October 21