Branching enzyme catalyzes the formation of alpha-1,6 branch points in either glycogen or starch. We report the 2.3-A crystal structure of glycogen branching enzyme from Escherichia coli. The enzyme consists of three major domains, an NH(2)-terminal seven-stranded beta-sandwich domain, a COOH-terminal domain, and a central alpha/beta-barrel domain containing the enzyme active site. While the ce...

This paper describes the X-ray crystallographic structure of a designed cyclic beta-sheet peptide that forms a well-defined hydrogen-bonded dimer that mimics beta-sheet dimers formed by proteins. The 54-membered ring macrocyclic peptide (1a) contains molecular template and turn units that induce beta-sheet structure in a heptapeptide strand that forms the dimerization interface. The X-ray cryst...

At the start of the millennium, the IUCr decided to launch its first fully electronic journal, Structure Reports Online (Section E of Acta Crystallographica), with its founding Main Editors William Clegg (Newcastle, UK) and David Watson (Cambridge, UK). The first issue appeared on 1 January 2001 reporting crystal structure results across a wide range of inorganic, organic and metal-organic mate...

Several methods to assess the (dis)similarity of protein structures objectively are described, some of which, when applied to non-crystallographically related protein models, are able to discriminate between significant differences and 'random noise'. Some of these methods have been used to investigate a sample of several hundred protein structures which have been solved by means of X-ray cryst...

X-ray diffraction methods were used to test a synthetic-modeling approach to the sequence engineering of bovine pancreatic ribonuclease. A model of RNase S-peptide (residues 1-20), having a simplified amino acid sequence but retaining elements deduced to be essential for conformation and function, was previously synthesized and found to form a catalytically active and stable complex with native...

A metal cluster-based inorganic–organic hybrid compound, (TBA) 2 [Mo 6 Br i 8 a ], exhibits reentrant transition of the crystallographic structure and photoluminescence property in low temperature range.