Crystallography Made Crystal Clear - A Guide for Users of Macromolecular Models

This much admired book has been carefully revised to make crystallography even more accessible to readers who have no prior experience with crystallography and macromolecular models, or their mathematical foundations. It continues to provide clear, understandable descriptions of the principles of protein crystallography with abundant illustrations and stereo images (in full color). Coverage extends to X-ray, neutron, electron, and Laue diffraction methods, as well as NMR spectroscopy and homology modeling. "My main goal was to make this edition's main chapters - on macromolecular crystallography - more timely, accurate, and clear, by weeding out older methods and replanting with descriptions of important new developments, culling out errors, and adding only those new ideas and details that will truly help you to get a feeling for how crystallography produces models of macromolecules. So what is new in crystallography since the last edition? First of all, it is faster than ever. Three developments - more powerful multiwavelength X-ray sources, low-temperature crystallography, and fast molecular biology methods for producing just about any protein and abundant variants of it - have set off an explosion of new structures. Automation has reached into every nook and cranny of the field, to the point that "high-throughput" crystallography is giving us models of proteins faster than we can figure out their functions. For the first time the book is fully illustrated in color and I found it very liberating to use color wherever I thought it would make illustrations easier to understand.