Membrane protein crystallization from lipidic phases

A prokaryotic perspective on pentameric ligand-gated ion channel structure

“…While GLIC was found to crystallize in different conditions at high pH (from 6.5-9.5), so far no well diffracting crystal could be obtained. A broader, more thorough screen, maybe including more recently developed methods like the lipidic cubic or lipidic sponge-phase [168] , might permit to find a suitable crystallization condition at high pH. An alternative approach in a similar direction would include the selection of antibodies [83] or designed ankyrin-repeat proteins [169] against the closed state of GLIC, to stabilize this structure in crystallization and / or to add possible crystal contacts.…”

The Significance of G Protein-Coupled Receptor Crystallography for Drug Discovery

“…This approach met with success in deter-922 mining a 2.2-Å structure for the photosynthetic reaction center of Rhodobacter sphaeroides, offering improvements in resolution and order over a previous structure determined from LCP grown crystals. However, this approach has not yet been employed successfully in GPCR structure determination (Wadsten et al, 2006;Johansson et al, 2009;Wöhri et al, 2009).…”

Steroid-based facial amphiphiles for stabilization and crystallization of membrane proteins

“…In recent years, there has been a substantial increase in the success of crystallization of MPs using novel amphiphiles, such as cubic phase-forming lipids or bilayered micelles (bicelles) (4), and fusions with soluble proteins to facilitate crystal contacts (5,6). Nevertheless, the success rate for growing well-diffracting 3D crystals has been much lower for MPs than soluble proteins, and MPs account for less than 2% of all current entries in the Protein Data Bank (PDB).…”