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Good reasons for structural biology

Nature Structural & Molecular Biology volume 31, pages 393–394 (2024)Cite this article

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The impressive achievements of structural biology leave us in awe, but also raise the question of whether we can still expect major developments in the field in the future. Before I provide my answer to this question, let me briefly reflect on the major advances in structural biology over the past three decades.

Thirty years ago, in 1994, the journal Nature Structural Biology (renamed Nature Structural and Molecular Biology ten years later) was launched as a response to the rapid growth of the field1. Around that time, I started as a graduate student at EMBL Grenoble and witnessed these exciting developments firsthand. The rapid growth in structural biology in the 1990s was due to several technological advances in X-ray crystallography, which enabled many structural studies of biomolecules. First, cryopreservation of crystals prevented radiation damage of proteins and thereby enabled the collection of complete diffraction data sets from single crystals2. Second, next-generation X-ray sources became available, in particular the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility next door to us, providing the brightest source of X-rays at that time3. Third, X-ray detectors made the tedious recording of diffraction patterns on film obsolete. Fourth, phasing of diffraction data became more straightforward by incorporating selenomethionine into proteins and using anomalous scattering4. Finally, faster computers enabled more-rapid data processing, and improvements in computer graphics and software facilitated the building and refinement of atomic models.

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Acknowledgements

I thank all past and current co-workers and collaborators for their many contributions to our shared research projects in structural biology, functional genomics and computational biology.

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  1. Department of Molecular Biology, Max Planck Institute for Multidisciplinary Science, Göttingen, Germany

    Patrick Cramer

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Correspondence to Patrick Cramer.

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Cramer, P. Good reasons for structural biology. Nat Struct Mol Biol 31, 393–394 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41594-024-01232-7

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