The Futile Cycle

October 26, 2007

A New GPCR Structure

Posted by Eric at 1:08 am | Category: Literature, News

The crystal structure of a human GPCR (beta 2 adrenergic receptor): Crystal structures of membrane proteins are really hard to obtain, because they tend to slide and be too “slippery” to get them to pack into an ordered, structured crystal. GPCRs are even harder, because they’ve got so many moving parts that it’s much harder to prevent them from sliding against each other. This is an amazing achievement, but even now you can see that they weren’t able to get everything they wanted; the resolution of the structure is low (over 3 angstroms) and a lot of their protein still didn’t crystalize very well. Still, very impressive.

Ben Says:
October 26th, 2007 at 10:49 am
Don’t forget they’re membrane proteins, which means you spend days finding the right detergent/suspension to crystallize them in
matt Says:
October 26th, 2007 at 8:42 pm
that’s just their Nature paper… look at the current Science Express… two papers in there with higher resolution and you can see more too.

Kobilka et al. have been working on this for over 15yrs. A truly remarkable achievement.
Eric Says:
October 27th, 2007 at 1:37 am
Awesome. Thanks for pointer.

It always strikes me as strange that scientists spend all their lives working to achieve results that can get summed up in a few sheets of paper that doesn’t do justice to their time and effort. Sure, grad students can write theses, but that’s nothing compared to the weighty tomes that historians churn out.