Innovative Approaches to Membrane Protein Crystallography & Drug Discovery (2006-2008)

We will develop innovative methods in high throughput protein crystallography for application to membrane protein structure determination and to improve new approaches to structure-based inhibitor design. This will lead to novel and practical ways of tackling these two major stumbling blocks of structural biology. By making these new approaches automatable, we will ensure that they can be applied to any target protein in a systematic manner. In the long-term, these new approaches will lead to a better understanding of biological processes and of how these processes fail in disease states, so that the structural outcomes will also provide the basis for development of novel therapeutics.