Villum experiment grant for overcoming the crystallization bottleneck in protein crystallography

The Villum experiment grants are a new type of grant to promote early phase bold ideas which are perhaps too high risk or at too early a stage to be funded by other type of grants. One such grant has been awarded to Leila Lo Leggio and Janina Sprenger, for a methodological project at the Department of Chemistry. The final aim is to overcome the need for obtaining crystals, the major limitation for protein structure determination by X-ray crystallography, by creating a universal host crystal system, in which large peptides and small to medium size proteins can be incorporated as guests. While there are undoubtadly a number of obstacles on the way to success, the grant provides a unique opportunity to systematically collect data and test various approaches utilizing state of the art synchrotron data collection and advanced computational methods borrowed from a number of biophysical techniques.