X-ray crystallography
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| Flow chart showing the major steps in X-ray protein crystallography. (Image from Wikimedia courtesy Thomas Splettstoesser. |
About 85% of the models (entries) in the World Wide Protein Data Bank were determined by X-ray crystallography. (Most of the remaining 15% were determined by solution nuclear magnetic resonance.) Protein crystallography remains very difficult, despite many recent advances. For every new protein sequence targeted for X-ray crystallography, about one in twenty is solved[1][2]. Publication of solved structures involves depositing an atomic coordinate file (PDB file) in the World Wide Protein Data Bank.