see
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/04/070430181143.htm

I hope this knowledge will soon be in boinc Rosetta too.

Hmmm, I thought that Rosetta modeling was being developed so as to be able to avoid the extreme time and expense of crystallography. But hey, I'm not a scientist.

"The math is used in conjunction with information captured via X-ray crystallography, a technique in which protein crystals are bombarded with X-rays, producing a diffraction pattern that reveals the precise three-dimensional arrangement of every atom in the protein.

Nobel laureate William Lipscomb of Harvard University, one of the founding fathers of protein crystallography in the North America, said, "This recent success in X-ray crystallographic refinement is revolutionary for the field of structure biology in terms of improving large and flexible complex structures that are becoming far more abundant nowadays."

see
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/04/070430181143.htm

I hope this knowledge will soon be in boinc Rosetta too.

Yes, the article is about improving the current methods of doing the structure prediction. Sounds like it removes a lot of the manual work out of the process and perhaps also allows them to better define large protein structures.

The idea with Rosetta is do the entire model in the computer. This saves you what is often weeks of time trying to the protein to crystalize, and then scheduling time in the huge X-Ray loop which is used to bombard the crystal with X-Rays to study the resulting diffraction patterns. Even this process takes many hours, because they must bombard the crystal from "all" points around it. I think they go every 1 degree of rotation, in all 3 dimensions.

However, it means that the definition of the "native" structure that you sometimes see in the Rosetta graphic will be better. Rosetta uses this, when it is known to see how effective their new modelling techniques are proving to be.

Thanks for the link.

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Rosetta Moderator: Mod.Sense