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| Sunday, 16 July 2006 10:11 | | BNN: British Nursing News Online · www.bnn-online.co.uk
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Scientists at the Imperial College London and the University of Surrey have developed a technique to crystallise proteins, which they say could aid the development of new drugs.
The team have found a way of producing high quality crystals.
In Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, they say this will allow better analysis of proteins, leading to the development of targeted drugs.
Crystallisation is the process which converts materials, such as proteins, into 3D crystals so they can be examined using X-ray crystallography.
Finding a way to do this successfully could make it much easier to examine many of the molecular pathways underpinning human biology.
Professor Nadia Chayen, who led the research, said: "The first step in obtaining a good crystal is to get it to nucleate in an ordered way.
"The 'holy grail' is to find a 'universal nucleant' which would induce crystallisation of any protein.
"Although there has been considerable research in search of a universal nucleant, this is the first time we have designed one which works on a large number of materials."
She added: "To target proteins, we need to know what they look like, what they do, their size and structure”.
She said treatments resulting from the research could be seen in around a decade.
The researchers plan to turn their discovery into a commercial product, using Imperial Innovations, Imperial College's technology transfer company.
Professor Stephen Pennington, of the Proteome Research Centre at University College Dublin, said the researchers were describing a "new and potentially very exciting approach".
He added: "There is clearly a long way to go to establish whether the silicon pore based nucleant is the desired universal nucleant.
"To their credit the authors do not claim that their approach will be the universal panacea.
"Realistically it is likely to become an important part in an armoury of approaches to induce protein crystallisation”.
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