The primary goal of the proposed research is to develop patentable materials and methodology that would greatly facilitate the difficult, slow and frequently expensive process of obtaining high quality protein crystals suitable for protein x-ray crystallography. The approach to be used involves attaching protein molecules, in a site-specific manner, to a synthetic core containing four sites of attachment arranged tetrahedrally. The complex, which now possesses structural symmetry, will be more prone to crystallization than the individual, inherently unsymmetrical protein molecules. The method also has the added advantage of providing for a general appproach to isomorphous replacement, a frequently necessary but sometimes difficult step in protein crystallography. %%% Three dimensional protein structures, obtained mostly through x-ray diffraction studies, are extremely valuable in computer-aided design studies, especially in the fields of protein engineering, pesticide design and drug design and development. An ancillary benefit of this study includes a possible deepening of our understanding of life processes in general at the molecular level.
