It is vital to know the structure of a protein to understand its chemical and biological functions. Scientists usually need to purify and crystallise a protein to determine its 3D structure by x-ray crystallography. Not only is this process difficult and lengthy, it can also misrepresent the protein’s structure, as the measuring conditions are vastly different from the conditions inside a living cell.

Coorperated with Prof. Conggang Li at Chinese Academy of Sciences, and Prof. Thomas Huber from the Australian National University, Prof. Xuncheng Su's group has demonstrated that the integration of site-specific tagging proteins and GPS-Rosetta calculations provides a fast and effective way of determining the structures of proteins in living cells, and in principle the interactions and dynamics of protein–ligand complexes.The measured effects from the beacons tagged onto the protein give away the positions of the atoms in the protein, in a similar way that a set of satellites can be used to locate the exact position of a GPS receiver.

Link: http://pubs.rsc.org/en/content/articlehtml/2016/cc/c6cc05490k