What does the process of X-ray crystallography do?
X-ray crystallography [provides] a precise three-dimensional view of a protein by shining beams of x-rays onto the protein [crystal] and then being able to solve the pattern of diffraction where those beams come off of the protein [crystal]. What you’re really trying to do in that procedure is to get a very precise three-dimensional view of a protein. X-ray crystallography [gives] us this structure now of many, many different proteins at a very precise level, at the level of angstroms of tens of billions of a meter resolution, and we didn’t have that before. Ten, twenty, thirty years ago we had just a very few known protein structures. Now we have many, many structures that we have solved. Can you explain how protein markers could be used to identify cancer? In many cancer studies now-and I think this will extend to many different kinds of diseases-you’d like to be able to take a sample (typically of blood) from an individual and [ask if] something gone wrong in a given tissue [is] ind
