In the decade since the publication of the first edition of Crystallographic
Methods and Protocols, the field has seen several major developments that have
both accelerated the pace of structure determination and made crystallography
accessible to a broader range of investigators. As evidence of this growth, this
new work, Macromolecular Crystallography Protocols, encompasses two volumes:
volume 1, Preparation and Crystallization of Macromolecules, and volume 2,
Structure Determination.
Fanning the fire are the large number of synchrotron beamlines dedicated to
macromolecular crystallography and the availability of inexpensive desktop
supercomputers. Expression systems for proteins and nucleic acids have greatly
improved as well. Several improvements come to mind: ligation-independent
cloning, the development of N-terminally fused expression tags that help protein
solubility, and the use of eukaryotic expression systems. In addition, structural
genomics has increasingly changed the way we go about solving crystal structures,
not only because of the shear increase in the number of deposited structures,
but more importantly because of the new tools the structural genomics
centers have developed and are making available to the community at large