A Brighter View Of A Hidden World

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July 26, 1999 Huntsville, AL The basic mechanics of living organisms, such as humans, are fairly well understood by doctors and scientists. Circulation systems send nutrients and other needed materials throughout the organism, muscles help provide movement through stretching and contracting, and digestive systems convert raw material into needed components that keep the system running.

Yet, within each organism is a hidden world of proteins that make all of this possible. Proteins are the building blocks of all life, and how they react with one another in living organisms determines many things, including if a creature will be healthy or get sick. Understanding this hidden world of proteins and their interactions is, needless to say, of intense interest to scientists and doctors.

One way of doing this is through protein crystallography. Each protein has a particular chemical structure, which means that it has a favored "shape. This shape is not smooth, but is rough, with chemical "arms or structures sticking out. It is these structures that allow each protein to do its job by interacting with chemicals or binding with other proteins. If researchers can determine the shape, or shapes, of a protein, they can learn how it works. To do this, they grow crystals of proteins, and then shoot X-rays through the crystal to "see its atomic structure. Getting the best possible information requires, among other things, a "bright source of X-rays.

The Center for Macromolecular Crystallography, a NASA Commercial Space Center located at the University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB), has just joined with 19 other southeastern universities to gain access to one of the brightest sources of X-rays in the world: The Advanced Photon Source at Argonne National Laboratory. UAB and the other universities have joined together to form the Southeastern Regional Collaborative Access Team (SERCAT). This team will build offices and two beamlines, the pathways that will tap the bright X-rays of the Advanced Photon Source and guide them to the target.

Access to these beamlines provides a host of new opportunities for the commercial research being done through the Center for Macromolecular Crystallography. Because the beamlines offer some of the brightest X-rays currently available, smaller crystals can be analyzed and the structure of various crystals can be determined much more precisely. Aside from helping make the research more productive, the beamlines also open up possibilities for creative ingenuity and scientific progress for the Center.

Though often more nearly perfect than Earth-grown counterparts, space-grown crystals grow more slowly. Because shuttle missions are relatively short, the crystals produced on them can be quite small. Access to the Advanced Photon Source will allow these small crystals to be analyzed and their structure determined with an accuracy not previously possible.

This will aid efforts to develop new drugs to treat a variety of diseases through a process known as rational, or structure-based drug design. Using the knowledge of a protein's structure, researchers can then design pharmaceuticals to either help a protein do its job, or keep it from doing its job. Because the drugs are targeted to a protein, they can be much more powerful yet have fewer side effects. Work on such drugs by the Center and its commercial partners includes treatments for the flu that are currently being tested.

Commercial research, such as that being done through the Center for Macromolecular Crystallography, is made possible through NASA's Space Product Development Program, a partnership between NASA, academia, and U.S. Industry. Working through Commercial Space Centers that are funded by both NASA and Industry, companies can do research designed to produce today the products and technologies of tomorrow. The research effort belongs to the industries involved, who are responsible for designing, funding, and analyzing the research. NASA, as its part of the partnership, provides access to microgravity for selected research.