How, in general, has crystallisation helped to speed up the understanding of biological processes?
I think that crystallisation itself is always complicated because it takes time in order to get the full story depending on how well the system crystallises. Very often you need years to obtain the results but new robotic systems have vastly speeded up the crystallisation process making life much easier. This automated high throughput crystallisation technique allows you to get crystals from each step. How has the advent of new techniques in crystallisation helped? We have seen a radical change. Today you don’t make a single crystal structure as in the past, but a whole series of crystal structures showing the entire process at different stages and then at the end you get movies of the complete process of repair. You can now obtain intermediates of the repair process and see how the repaired DNA is released and so you can really make a movie of the cellular process that is going on. I think the ability to make this movie has changed the crystallographic world.”We have a strategic advan
