Crystal Clear: The ability to crystallize proteins in space is accelerating drug development on Earth.

Structure-based drug design is on the front line of promising advancements in disease treatment and personalized medicine. However, the difficulties of characterizing protein structures hamper these drug development efforts. To visualize the topography of a protein, one must crystallize the protein in a solution, outside its natural environment of the human body. Finding the ideal solution in which to grow protein crystals for three-dimensional (3-D) structural analysis is an arduous process; most proteins have distinct optimal requirements for crystallization, so no standard experimental conditions are available that will work for all proteins in the human body.