NEW YORK (GenomeWeb News) – Bruker and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory today announced a partnership to develop and distribute new methods aimed at the structural biology field.
Under the collaboration, the two partners will develop and distribute new methods and tools to integrate small-angle X-ray scattering (SAXS) with nuclear magnetic resonance. Specifically, they are developing a set of integrated SAXS and NMR data analysis algorithms for determining the structures of larger multi-domain proteins and protein complexes with DNA, RNA, or other proteins.
John Tainer, a professor at Scripps Research Institute, and Robert Rambo from the Berkeley Lab will direct the effort.
"Such multi-modality approaches based on complementary analytical technologies play a key role in helping researchers answer increasingly complex questions in structural biology and drug development, and hold the potential for advancements in clinical research applications," Bruker and Berkeley Lab said in a statement.
Their approach will combine and integrate traditional NMR 3D atomic structure determination of the individual protein domains with SAXS determination of overall size, shape, and envelope constraints. The collaboration, they said, will result in more accurate structures for larger multi-domain proteins and protein complexes under near-native solution conditions than with NMR alone.
This approach has been demonstrated to help in clarifying important functional information about intrinsically flexible, unstructured, or partially unfolded domains, they added.