Towards patient-relevant structures: reviewing body-temperature biological macromolecules and their ligands for pharmaceutical applications

Regulation of pharmaceutical lead compounds does not yet involve the need for patient-relevant macromolecular structures determined at 37°C; nevertheless, we highlight the advantages of these to ensure chemical relevance and the identification of changes which may occur under physiological conditions. The PDB and CSD entries for diffraction data measured at ≥37°C, as well as a cryoEM 37°C freeze-trapped structure, are considered and the description includes structures obtained well above 37°C that are relevant to thermophile and hyperthermophile structural biology.

Strategies for mitigating radiation damage and improving data completeness in 3D electron diffraction of protein crystals

This work demonstrates that multi-position data acquisition mitigates radiation damage in electron diffraction of three-dimensional protein crystals and that merging data from selected crystals in distinct orientations enhances completeness. Application of the two approaches enables high-quality structural models to be obtained from limited or sensitive samples.

A new macromolecular crystallography endstation at NanoTerasu for accelerating structural biology and drug discovery

The construction of a new experimental station for macromolecular crystallography at NanoTerasu under the AMED/BINDS project is presented.

Leopard-EM: an extensible 2D template-matching package to accelerate in situ structural biology

In situ cryo-EM coupled with 2D template matching (2DTM) holds the potential to visualize the cellular structureome in context, but further developments are required to make this a reality. We describe Leopard-EM (Location and orientation of particles found using two-dimensional tEmplate Matching), an extensible Python package for 2DTM to accelerate in situ structural biology.

The crystal structure of EpHTT, a hydroxycinnamoyl transferase from Echinacea purpurea

This study presents the first crystal structure of a hydroxycinnamoyl-CoA:tartaric acid hydroxycinnamoyl transferase from E. purpurea (EpHTT), a specialized BAHD acyltransferase central to the biosynthesis of chicoric acid. We successfully expressed, purified and crystallized the full-length EpHTT protein (residues 1–424) and determined its high-resolution structure at 2.38 Å.

Structure, substrate recognition and therapeutic targeting of the human ADAMTS-5 spacer domain

We present the crystal structure of a segment of human ADAMTS-5 that includes part of the cysteine-rich domain and the spacer domain.