The Automated Approach to Protein Structure

Abstract

If Thomas Earnest and a handful of like-minded colleagues have their way, robots may someday put human crystallographers out of work. Earnest, who heads a new crystallography beamline at the Advanced Light Source in Berkeley, California, is working with a handful of other groups to automate every stage of determining protein structure—from generating the proteins to crystallizing them, blasting them with x-rays, and analyzing the data. “We're really trying to minimize the amount of human intervention necessary,” says Earnest.