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Publication Abstract from PubMed

High-throughput X-ray crystal structures of protein-ligand complexes are critical to pharmaceutical drug development. However, cryocooling of crystals and X-ray radiation damage may distort the observed ligand binding. Serial femtosecond crystallography (SFX) using X-ray free-electron lasers (XFELs) can produce radiation-damage-free room-temperature structures. Ligand-binding studies using SFX have received only modest attention, partly owing to limited beamtime availability and the large quantity of sample that is required per structure determination. Here, a high-throughput approach to determine room-temperature damage-free structures with excellent sample and time efficiency is demonstrated, allowing complexes to be characterized rapidly and without prohibitive sample requirements. This yields high-quality difference density maps allowing unambiguous ligand placement. Crucially, it is demonstrated that ligands similar in size or smaller than those used in fragment-based drug design may be clearly identified in data sets obtained from <1000 diffraction images. This efficiency in both sample and XFEL beamtime opens the door to true high-throughput screening of protein-ligand complexes using SFX.

High-throughput structures of protein-ligand complexes at room temperature using serial femtosecond crystallography.,Moreno-Chicano T, Ebrahim A, Axford D, Appleby MV, Beale JH, Chaplin AK, Duyvesteyn HME, Ghiladi RA, Owada S, Sherrell DA, Strange RW, Sugimoto H, Tono K, Worrall JAR, Owen RL, Hough MA IUCrJ. 2019 Oct 10;6(Pt 6):1074-1085. doi: 10.1107/S2052252519011655. eCollection, 2019 Nov 1. PMID:31709063^[1]

From MEDLINE®/PubMed®, a database of the U.S. National Library of Medicine.