Research Group:

Synchrotron Structural Biology

Research Area:

Beamline:

Overview of Research Group, Goals and Purposes:

The understanding of biological function derived from three-dimensional structures of key proteins and nucleic acids is particularly important in biology and becomes essential for applied biosciences, protein engineering or structure based drug design. Most of the structure models deposited in the Protein Data Bank (PDB) are determined by X-ray crystallography taking advantage of powerful synchrotron sources. In addition, hybrid approaches to the structural biology using techniques such as SAXS, IR, XAFS and Mössbauer spectroscopy become now widespread for better understanding of biological functions.

Even though we can now determine many protein structures very rapidly, it is still difficult to to solve the crystal structures with long unit cell parameters, small crystal size, poor diffraction quality or severe radiation damage. Therefore, the structural biology beamlines in synchrotrons provide a wide range of performance covering the variety of samples with different properties. In SPring-8, there are several characteristic beamlines individually optimized for specific purpose. They are operated not only by JASRI, but also by RIKEN Harima Institute and Osaka University. SPring-8 users of structural biology also come from the various organizations; universities, national institutes and private companies.

In order to utilize the SPring-8 structural biology beamlines more effectively, a new national project “Basis for Supporting Innovative Drug Discovery and Life Science Research (BINDS)” has started from 2017. The X-ray Free Electron Laser (SACLA) has come on line and is open for public users. Now, the situation in structural biology is changing and very exciting. The most important goal of our group is to further develop synchrotron structural biology by supporting the connection between the SPring-8 and the user community.

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