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Course description
After a survey into practice and principles of protein crystallization methods, and of protein production procedures, this course will focus mainly on the theoretical foundations of X-ray diffraction for the crystallographic structure determinations of biological macromolecules and assemblies. Questions asked are for instance:
“Why spots when you put a crystal in the X-ray beam?”
“What does the intensity of the spots tell us?”
“What can you do with intensities of spots alone?”
“What is the crystallographic phase problem and how can one solve it?”
“What is the power of density averaging?”
“What are the principles of crystal structure refinement?”
“How are large assemblies and virus structures tackled?”
Knowledge of matrix algebra, of Fourier transforms, and of basic aspects of crystallography, such as crystal symmetry, will help in understanding the material presented. You will be walking in crystallization space, vector space and reciprocal space, to arrive in the real world of coordinate and biology space.
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