It's called cross-soaking and it is a fairly popular technique especially in the industrial community where we sometimes have to work with hundreds of ligands.
I've done it on several occasions and mostly have been pretty happy with the results. Having said this I also would like to point out that soaking is not always the same as co-crystallization in terms of the ligand-protein interactions. An extreme case is shown in the paper below (figure 5): http://www.iucr.org/cgi-bin/paper?sx5059 PDBID: 2i4g, 2i4h Cheers, Artem On Wed, Mar 17, 2010 at 11:09 AM, Kontopidis George <gkontopi...@vet.uth.gr> wrote: > Pentapeptide ligand removed from the binding site of the protein crystal and > replaced with different peptide ligand > Insights into Cyclin Groove Recognition: Complex Crystal Structures and > Inhibitor Design through Ligand Exchange, Kontopidis, G., et. al. > 2003,Structure 11 (12), pp. 1537-1546 > > George > > > > -----Original Message----- > From: CCP4 bulletin board [mailto:ccp...@jiscmail.ac.uk] On Behalf Of > Critton, David > Sent: Wednesday, March 17, 2010 6:02 PM > To: CCP4BB@JISCMAIL.AC.UK > Subject: [ccp4bb] Soaking to Remove Bound Ligands from Crystals > > Dear ccp4bb, > > I recently came across a thread from 2007 discussing the removal of > ions/ligands from protein crystals > (https://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/cgi-bin/webadmin?A2=ind0705&L=CCP4BB&P=R35929). > The thread cited a couple of papers (Ray et al. 1991; Schreuder et al. 1988) > in which crystals were grown in the presence of a given ligand, then soaked > in conditions containing little (if any) ligand in order to remove the > ligand from these crystals. > > I would like to know if there are any other reports of this method, > especially if any structures were solved from pre- and post-soaked crystals, > and what kinds of conformational changes (if any) accompany these kinds of > soaks. > > Thank you in advance, > David A. Critton > Graduate Student, Page Laboratory > Department of Molecular Biology, Cell Biology & Biochemistry > Brown University > Providence, RI >
