From Penicillin to the Ribosome: Revolutions in the Determination and Use of Molecular Structure in Chemistry and Biology

Edward N. Baker

doi:10.1071/CH04090

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From Penicillin to the Ribosome: Revolutions in the Determination and Use of Molecular Structure in Chemistry and Biology

Edward N. Baker ^A

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^A School of Biological Sciences and Department of Chemistry, University of Auckland, Auckland, New Zealand (e-mail: ted.baker@auckland.ac.nz).

Professor Ted Baker is a chemistry graduate of the University of Auckland. After postdoctoral research at Oxford University, working with Dorothy Hodgkin on the structure of insulin, he established New Zealand’s first structural biology programme at Massey University. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of New Zealand, a former International Research Scholar of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, and a past-President of the International Union of Crystallography. He is currently Professor of Structural Biology at the University of Auckland, where he heads a laboratory of more than 30 researchers, and also serves as Director of the Centre for Molecular Biodiscovery, a recently established national Centre of Research Excellence. His current research interests focus on experimental protein structure analysis and its applications to functional genomics, structure-based drug design, and microbial pathogenesis.

Australian Journal of Chemistry 57(9) 829-836 https://doi.org/10.1071/CH04090
Submitted: 1 April 2004 Accepted: 9 July 2004 Published: 1 September 2004

Abstract

A revolution in structural analysis is in progress in the biological sciences that parallels a similar revolution that took place in chemistry 40–50 years ago. This has major implications for chemistry, offering exciting opportunities at the interface between chemistry and biology. The advances are driven by the value of structural information in biology, for understanding biological function, and for applications in structure-based drug design and structural genomics. Two directions are apparent: towards technically challenging biological structures and assemblies, typified by the potassium channel and the ribosome; and towards high-throughput structure determination of many, smaller, proteins, as in structural genomics. In this review, the advances in molecular biology and in structure determination by X-ray crystallography that make these developments possible are discussed, together with appropriate examples.

Acknowledgments

The author thanks Heather Baker, Vickery Arcus, Nayden Koon, Neil Peterson, and Jodie Johnston for help with the figures, and gratefully acknowledges the many colleagues, postdoctoral researchers, and students who have contributed to the ideas and results presented here. The research in structural genomics described here has been supported by the Health Research Council, the Marsden Fund, and the New Economy Research Fund of New Zealand.

References

From Penicillin to the Ribosome: Revolutions in the Determination and Use of Molecular Structure in Chemistry and Biology

Abstract

Acknowledgments

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