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As a structural biologist my work involves the use of biology, chemistry and physics to achieve my goals. To produce a 3D structure of a protein we fire X-rays at crystals and these produce a pattern that can be recorded. These patterns contain information about how a protein looks but they don’t have everything we need. A synchrotron is effectively a giant microscope for X-rays, but without all the information it is impossible to focus it and see your protein. My project involves the use of a special type of X-ray and experimental set-up to retrieve this lost information and bring the structures into focus.Using these special types of X-rays brings about a whole mess of complications that I’m helping to overcome.

As well as helping in the development of this technique I am also working on solving the structure of a protein involved in the development of cancer in humans. For many years crystallography has been a key technique in figuring out exactly what a protein does in the body, what they interact with and how genetic mutations or infections cause disease. It’s particularly useful in finding out how drugs work on proteins. I hope that by finding the structure of this protein I will be able to see how exactly this protein acts in the body to cause cancer and see how we can prevent this.

The great thing about working in structural biology is a typical day is difficult to define because there are so many aspects to consider.

Some days it will be straight to the microbiology lab where I would be genetically modifying bacteria to produce a specific protein I’m interested in. Once I’ve done that I can burst open the bacteria using sonic waves or high pressure, this release all the proteins in the cell and it’s now my job to isolate that one protein I want. This may sound quick but it can take weeks, months or years  to get your protein alone. If you work hard enough or are lucky enough you’ll get your protein alone and be able to produce a crystal from it.

Once you’ve got a crystal a typical day is very different, this is when you get to head over to the synchrotron and fire X-rays at your protein and hopefully produce a 3D model of  your protein. No genetic modification but you do get to use a robot, radiation and a building over 0.5K in circumference kicking out 3GeV of energy. The days after this involve a lot of computer work to analyse the pattern and get your missing information to focus the artificial microscope and see your protein. Hopefully this tells you something about how the protein works, because structure is function.