Conveners
Bio-crystallography
- Ralf Ficner (Univ. Goettingen)
Bio-crystallography
- Thomas Schneider (EMBL c/o DESY)
Bio-crystallography
- Wulf Blankenfeldt (Helmholtz Centre for Infection Research)
Cytotoxic Necrotizing Factors (CNFs) are single-chain AB-toxins and important virulence factors in pathogens such as uropathogenic E. coli (UPEC) or enteropathogenic Yersinia species. Their cytotoxic effect is based on the constitutive activation of small GTPases (Rho family) by deamidation of a glutamine residue in the switch II region, leading to cytoskeletal alterations and finally...
Contributed on behalf of the Hamburg SARS-CoV-2 X-ray screening initiative
As a response to the current SARS-CoV-2 pandemic we have set up a large consortium of more than one hundred scientist centered around DESY in Hamburg. In contrast to common screening techniques such as biochemical activity-based assays or X-ray fragment screening, here we employed massive X-ray crystallographic...
The Coronavirus Structural Task Force [1] was an ad hoc collaboration of mostly junior researchers across nine time zones, brought together by the desire to fight the pandemic.
Most of us are crystallographic methods developers and as early as February 2020, we started evaluating the structures of macromolecules in SARS-CoV and later SARS-CoV-2 as they became available from the Protein Data...
The experimental workflow of macromolecular crystallography has been improved enormously in the last two decades, especially regarding speed and throughput. One step of this workflow, namely the manipulation and harvesting of crystals, remains labour- and time-intense even though considerable efforts have been applied. In order to tackle this bottleneck, we developed a novel, low-cost device...
The Macromolecular Crystallography (MX) group at the Helmholtz-Zentrum Berlin (HZB) has been in operation since 2003. Since then, three state-of-the-art synchrotron beam lines (BL14.1-3) for MX have been built up on a 7T-wavelength shifter source [1-3]. Currently, the three beam lines represent the most productive MX-stations in Germany, with more than 3500 PDB depositions (Status 12/2020)....
Beamline P11 at PETRA III in Hamburg is a versatile instrument for macromolecular crystallography (1). During ‘the Corona-year’ 2020 we operated in very exceptional conditions. Here we describe DESY responses to the pandemic situation, such as the fast-track access to the beamline, exceptional user regulations and remote access.
To date, 35 PDB depositions have arisen from P11 related to...
The severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) papain-like protease (PLpro) is essential for the virus replication. PLpro has the additional function of removing ubiquitin and ISG15 (Interferon-stimulated gene 15) from host-cell proteins to aid coronaviruses in their evasion of the host innate immune responses. PLpro is thus an excellent drug target for a two-fold strategy to...
Many bacteria harbor RNA-dependent nucleoside-triphosphatases of the DEAH/RHA family (1), whose molecular mechanisms and cellular functions are poorly understood (2). Here, we show that the Escherichia coli DEAH/RHA protein, HrpA, is an ATP-dependent 3’-to-5’ RNA helicase, and that the RNA helicase activity of HrpA influences bacterial survival under antibiotics treatment. Limited proteolysis,...
The only method utilized routinely to discover starting points for ligand development that at the same time delivers detailed 3D-information for downstream ligand optimization is macromolecular crystallography. Typically, small organic compounds, called fragments, are screened against an optimized crystal system of a target protein, and detected by electron density differences compared to the...
Spatially resolved anomalous dispersion (SpReAD) refinement is a method to analyse the oxidation states of individual protein-bound metals and is based on collecting several x-ray diffraction datasets across an x-ray absorption edge. Such an approach can expose crystals to relatively high total dose of radiation. This can result in radiation damage, including reduction of metals.
Here, we...