The Discovery of Macromolecular Cryocrystallography

Part 1: Cryo-cooling Protein Crystals: The First 52 Years

00:00:07.01 Hello, my name is David Haas.
00:00:09.10 And as you can see from the title,
00:00:12.29 the subject is going to be cryo-cooling protein crystals
00:00:15.10 and other macromolecular crystals.
00:00:18.06 The reason that crystals are cryo-cooled
00:00:21.07 is so that they reduce radiation damage
00:00:23.17 during synchrotron X-ray detection.
00:00:28.03 I did this work on cryo-cooling
00:00:30.14 the very first protein crystal back in 1967.
00:00:33.05 And then I left science in 1970
00:00:36.12 and didn't discover that, in fact,
00:00:38.17 it was being used until just a few years ago.
00:00:41.05 It turns out that the message
00:00:44.03 that I'm going to deliver today
00:00:46.10 is in fact that research that you publish
00:00:49.03 -- your scientific research --
00:00:50.27 in peer-reviewed journals will in fact...
00:00:53.16 could possibly be used years and years ahead,
00:00:56.14 when you can't even foresee what will happen,
00:00:58.28 and that's exactly what happened to me.
00:01:01.05 The article I published in 1970
00:01:04.19 was read
00:01:06.20 and has been used very successfully today
00:01:08.19 by thousands of scientists around the world,
00:01:14.00 with all types of synchrotron radiation.
00:01:16.21 So, I'm going to tell you the story.
00:01:19.04 And in fact, this is a picture taken of me
00:01:20.28 when I worked in crystallography for five years,
00:01:23.00 between 1965 and 1970.
00:01:25.02 And then I joined industry.
00:01:27.05 So, this is when I was a graduate student
00:01:29.08 collecting data at the University of Buffalo.
00:01:33.00 In 1965 I went on my first postoc,
00:01:36.20 and it was with David Phillips at the Royal Institution in London
00:01:40.05 And in fact you can see here the Lysozyme molecule.
00:01:43.15 He had just solved the structure in 1965.
00:01:46.15 And when I arrived he had suggested a project for me, and that
00:01:51.13 I look at trying to reduce radiation damage in protein crystals.
00:01:55.15 So I worked on that for a year and a half
00:01:57.20 at the Royal Institution with David Phillips, and of course,
00:02:01.10 at that time, Sir Lawrence Bragg was actually the director,
00:02:03.25 so he was very interested in the subject also.
00:02:07.05 A year and a half, I had no results whatsoever.
00:02:10.10 And then I left the Royal Institution
00:02:12.20 and went to the Weizmann Institute soon after that,
00:02:15.05 and I'll tell you that story later on.
00:02:17.15 But the important fact is that three dimensional structures
00:02:21.10 of protein crystals had become very important, and its actually
00:02:24.20 created any entire new field called structural biology.
00:02:29.00 In 1971, the Protein Data Bank was begun.
00:02:32.26 And this is a picture of the various proteins.
00:02:36.20 There were 9 protein structures solved in 1973.
00:02:39.14 The Protein Data Bank has basically
00:02:43.11 become the heart of molecular biology.
00:02:45.11 It is the resource where all the structures
00:02:47.29 of macromolecules are saved.
00:02:50.14 And today, there are more than 150,000 structures
00:02:54.00 that have been deposited,
00:02:57.29 both of proteins, nucleic acids, DNA,
00:03:01.00 and a number of other macromolecules.
00:03:02.25 One of the most remarkable things is that
00:03:06.07 each year, now,
00:03:08.13 about 10,000 new structures are being deposited.
00:03:10.09 That's about 50 a day.
00:03:12.01 And the data is being collected...
00:03:14.20 the crystal data for X-rays
00:03:17.05 is being collected on synchrotrons.
00:03:20.06 So, I only discovered this just a few years ago.
00:03:23.22 And when I went to my scientific meeting in 19...
00:03:26.23 in 2015, I was given a copy of this magazine,
00:03:30.17 which is a special issue of Journal of Molecular Biology --
00:03:34.28 50 years of Protein Structure.
00:03:37.04 And Max Perutz and, of course, John Kendrew
00:03:40.10 were the two scientists who determined
00:03:42.08 the very first protein structures.
00:03:45.24 But today, it is 60 years -- 2019 --
00:03:50.01 since the first protein structures were solved,
00:03:52.20 and it's been 52 years
00:03:55.27 since the first cryo-cooling of protein crystals.
00:03:58.27 The Protein Data Bank has increased
00:04:02.17 in the number of structures dramatically.
00:04:07.21 And what is surprising is that
00:04:10.09 about 90% of all these structures
00:04:12.23 in the Protein Data Bank
00:04:14.19 have been cryo-cooled,
00:04:16.09 meaning that the data was collected
00:04:18.07 at about 100 Kelvin.
00:04:21.05 From the Journal of Molecular Biology issue,
00:04:24.11 there was a paragraph that said the three most significant things
00:04:29.23 for the creation of the structural biology field
00:04:32.22 are in fact the invention of the synchrotron;
00:04:35.15 the cryo-cooling of crystals,
00:04:37.18 which permits them to be used;
00:04:40.18 and of course the high-speed computers
00:04:42.25 and the remarkable computer programs and software
00:04:45.08 that have been developed to solve the structures.
00:04:48.13 And just to amplify on that a little bit,
00:04:51.13 this is the synchrotron at Brookhaven National Laboratory.
00:04:55.01 There are 50 synchrotrons similar to this
00:04:58.06 around the world,
00:04:59.19 and they are available to all scientists.
00:05:01.21 A synchrotron produces X-rays
00:05:04.09 about 10 million times more intense
00:05:06.05 than the vacuum tubes that I used.
00:05:08.11 I mean... 10 million times... just remarkable.
00:05:11.14 You can collect the data on a single crystal
00:05:13.21 in a matter of minutes,
00:05:15.12 whereas in the 1960s,
00:05:18.01 it would take months or years to collect the data.
00:05:21.15 And of course, the synchrotrons...
00:05:23.11 now that they provide such an intense X-ray source,
00:05:26.16 the crystals are protected by cryo-cooling,
00:05:29.12 and simply...
00:05:31.24 putting the crystals into liquid nitrogen.
00:05:33.29 And that's exactly the way it was done in 1967.
00:05:36.25 That I'm going to tell you about.
00:05:39.02 And the third thing, of course,
00:05:41.14 is the magnificent computer software and hardware
00:05:44.02 that is available today
00:05:45.29 that permits three dimensional structures
00:05:48.02 not only to be solved
00:05:49.28 but also the graphic interfaces
00:05:51.20 that permit you to visualize them.
00:05:53.17 But there is also a fourth area.
00:05:56.04 And that is in fact the cloning to be able to produce proteins,
00:06:01.06 the purification of proteins,
00:06:03.13 and a third area, which is the crystallization of proteins,
00:06:05.27 which has become an entire field in itself,
00:06:08.29 just the ability to be able to crystallize
00:06:11.27 these enormous macromolecules.
00:06:15.11 So, this really is a Back-to-the-Future story.
00:06:18.28 This is the story that happened to me,
00:06:22.09 and that's what I want to relate to you.
00:06:24.07 As young scientists or graduate students,
00:06:27.15 basically,
00:06:29.15 you should realize that once you publish your scientific results
00:06:31.15 in a peer-reviewed journal,
00:06:33.11 it could be used anytime in the future.
00:06:36.06 And this Back-to-the-Future story
00:06:39.04 that I'm telling you
00:06:40.28 is exactly what happened to me.
00:06:42.13 50 years later,
00:06:44.15 I discovered that the work that I did...
00:06:46.26 which I had totally forgotten about...
00:06:49.12 I discovered it was very valuable.
00:06:52.13 So, in 1970,
00:06:56.14 Michael Rossman and I published the paper,
00:06:58.18 the second paper on cryo-cooling.
00:07:01.12 And the purpose in it
00:07:04.04 was taking on lactate dehydrogenase crystal,
00:07:06.05 cryo-cooled,
00:07:07.21 and we showed that, in fact,
00:07:09.27 the radiation damage at room temperature
00:07:12.03 is much more severe than it is at cryo-cooled.
00:07:14.27 In fact, we showed that there's
00:07:18.25 an improvement of ten times the life of the crystal
00:07:20.28 at low temperatures.
00:07:23.02 Today, in synchrotrons,
00:07:24.29 typically they consider the crystals
00:07:28.00 to have 70 times or more the lifetime
00:07:30.13 in the X-ray beam.
00:07:32.19 So, this is the first quantitative proof,
00:07:34.23 and it came out of this 1970 paper.
00:07:37.27 So, let me just review with you,
00:07:40.01 basically, my five years in crystallography
00:07:42.22 and basic science.
00:07:44.23 After graduating from University of Buffalo with David Harker,
00:07:48.17 we arranged for a postdoc
00:07:52.08 at the Royal Institution of Great Britain.
00:07:54.06 David Phillips had just finished working
00:07:56.26 on the lysozyme structure.
00:07:58.26 And in fact, Sir Lawrence Bragg
00:08:00.26 was the director.
00:08:03.11 After working a year and a half
00:08:05.03 on not having any results whatsoever
00:08:07.18 on reducing the radiation damage,
00:08:10.13 I went to the Weizmann Institute
00:08:12.10 because he (David Phillips)
00:08:14.25 had taken a position at Oxford.
00:08:16.13 And upon arriving at the Weizmann,
00:08:18.22 I decided that I'd already cont...
00:08:20.24 I brought all my supplies with me,
00:08:22.19 and I continued to work on the radiation damage,
00:08:26.12 probably...
00:08:27.25 on the project for about three more months.
00:08:30.10 In March of 1967,
00:08:32.22 I decided that it was absolutely hopeless.
00:08:34.10 I needed to find some other alternative.
00:08:36.13 And what I did, in fact,
00:08:39.24 was made a list of all the alternatives
00:08:41.26 that I could think of,
00:08:43.18 and I chatted with Wolfie Traub,
00:08:45.12 who was the director of the crystallography lab.
00:08:47.28 And I concluded that cryo-cooling
00:08:49.28 looked like the most promising.
00:08:51.17 And as fate would have it,
00:08:53.08 Wolfie Traub had just built
00:08:55.28 a cryo-cooling apparatus about five years before,
00:08:58.14 and it was sitting in the laboratory unused.
00:09:01.02 So... and not only that,
00:09:03.18 he said I could use it,
00:09:05.22 as well as the technician who was currently in the lab,
00:09:08.02 who was the one who built it,
00:09:09.29 and he would teach me how to use it.
00:09:11.24 So, I was able to cryo-cool lysozome crystals
00:09:14.24 with cryoprotectants.
00:09:17.14 They gave pristine diffraction patterns
00:09:21.15 like this one.
00:09:23.06 And then, in fact, after leaving it in the beam day after day after day,
00:09:27.00 there was no change.
00:09:28.22 And this was the first indication that I had
00:09:31.11 that in fact there was some protection,
00:09:34.01 or there was real radiation reduction,
00:09:36.09 in this lysozyme crystal.
00:09:38.27 So, this paper was published
00:09:41.09 from the Weizmann.
00:09:43.25 And then the Six-Day War occurred
00:09:47.23 in June of 1967.
00:09:49.11 I had already arranged with Michael Rossmann
00:09:51.14 at Purdue University
00:09:54.07 to go there, and I arrived in late 1967 at Purdue.
00:10:00.20 My project that I wanted to work on with Michael
00:10:04.28 was to show quantitatively
00:10:07.13 that in fact radiation reduction is performed.
00:10:12.14 And I was able to convince Michael,
00:10:14.20 by showing him those wonderful precession pictures
00:10:17.16 from the Weizmann,
00:10:19.06 that in fact I could do the project.
00:10:23.01 So, he loaned his diffractometer,
00:10:25.13 and I built this equipment at Purdue in 1967,
00:10:29.26 and we collected all the data during the summer of 1968.
00:10:34.21 After that, we wrote the paper.
00:10:37.25 And this was published in April of 1969,
00:10:44.20 as the Haas and Rossmann paper.
00:10:46.09 We submitted it in July of '68.
00:10:48.29 And basically, the most important part of that paper
00:10:51.22 was in fact this drawing
00:10:54.29 of the radiation decay,
00:10:56.19 which clearly shows
00:10:58.29 a ten-fold improvement in radiation reduction damage
00:11:01.25 in a cryo-cooled state.
00:11:06.08 Soon after that,
00:11:08.08 I had given a number of [talks] on this result
00:11:11.04 and the cryo-cooling of protein crystals
00:11:16.03 at a number of scientific meetings,
00:11:17.24 and basically, at each of the meetings,
00:11:20.02 there were no questions
00:11:22.08 and a number of people said it's nice work
00:11:24.06 but it has absolutely no application.
00:11:26.06 So, besides having a little depression from that,
00:11:31.25 I also decided I really wasn't fit for academia,
00:11:35.05 and I joined industry.
00:11:36.29 So, in 1970 through basically 2015,
00:11:40.01 I was out of the academic world.
00:11:44.05 In 2015, as I said,
00:11:47.06 I went to the American Crystallographic Association meeting,
00:11:50.19 and I started learning about structural biology,
00:11:57.07 I was invited to attend
00:11:59.09 the X-ray methods course at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory.
00:12:01.28 And that was 2017.
00:12:05.24 16 days of intense study.
00:12:09.20 But the most remarkable part
00:12:12.04 was that in the first week,
00:12:14.16 we grew lysozyme crystals,
00:12:16.09 we cryo-cooled them,
00:12:18.16 and then we sent him to the Brookhaven synchrotron
00:12:21.08 and collected all the data
00:12:23.10 in a matter of minutes.
00:12:25.28 I can tell you,
00:12:27.24 one of my surprises was walking into the hutch...
00:12:29.20 the X-ray hutch at the synchrotron,
00:12:31.14 which is what this photograph is...
00:12:34.25 basically, the instrumentation looked so fantastic,
00:12:37.15 and I didn't recognize any of it,
00:12:39.26 except for the dewar,
00:12:42.02 the liquid nitrogen dewar,
00:12:43.15 which basically was the same dewar
00:12:45.08 that James Dewar had invented back in 1892.
00:12:49.29 So, I didn't feel so bad about that.
00:12:52.01 One of the remarkable coincidences
00:12:55.29 is that in 1892,
00:12:59.28 James Dewar did his work in exactly the same...
00:13:02.29 at the Royal Institution,
00:13:04.21 but it was also in exactly the same laboratory
00:13:06.20 that I did my X-ray work
00:13:08.17 when I was there in 1965.
00:13:11.25 And I'm sure James Dewar
00:13:14.07 would be very impressed about how his invention
00:13:16.25 is being used today.
00:13:19.02 So, the results of structural biology
00:13:21.29 and the Protein Data Bank
00:13:24.16 basically produced an entire foundation
00:13:26.27 for molecular biology.
00:13:28.14 And I'm sure many of you
00:13:31.11 who are in the biological sciences
00:13:33.14 have come to appreciate the value
00:13:35.13 of having these remarkable three-dimensional structures
00:13:38.08 and data available.
00:13:40.15 So, in my second presentation,
00:13:45.01 I'm gonna tell you about how my postdoctoral work,
00:13:47.00 50 years later,
00:13:48.29 has contributed substantially to structure-based drug design,
00:13:52.06 which has led to many of the drugs
00:13:56.02 that have been used for the HIV epidemic,
00:14:00.00 and as I will specifically show you,
00:14:02.14 the Lazarus effect,
00:14:04.03 which is one of...
00:14:05.24 one of the phenomena that happened in 1996
00:14:09.03 during the HIV epidemic.
00:14:13.27 I'd also like to thank the people
00:14:17.12 who helped me over the years:
00:14:19.26 as you might gather, David Phillips,
00:14:22.24 who suggested the original project
00:14:25.28 of reducing radiation damage;
00:14:28.22 Wolfie Traub... if he had not had, in his laboratory,
00:14:32.20 the cryo-cooling equipment that I used,
00:14:34.11 it probably never would have gotten done...
00:14:36.14 probably 10, 20, 30 years later;
00:14:39.24 Michael Rossman, I think who recognized
00:14:42.18 the importance of having a single crystal
00:14:45.02 that showed reduced radiation damage
00:14:47.20 so you could collect all your data;
00:14:49.22 and then I especially want to thank
00:14:52.09 Elspeth Garman,
00:14:54.10 who was one of the experts in radiation damage
00:14:57.02 and has taught me, in a matter of months,
00:15:00.05 what I did not learn in 50 years.
00:15:03.01 So, the final sentence should be
00:15:06.01 "science for the benefit of humanity,"
00:15:08.01 which is exactly what I see structural biology
00:15:10.16 has contributed.
00:15:12.05 Thank you.

Part 2: HIV and Structural Biology

00:00:07.28 Hello, my name is David Haas,
00:00:09.29 and in my previous presentation,
00:00:12.26 I explained to you how cryo-cooling was invented
00:00:16.23 and has contributed substantially
00:00:18.25 to the field of structural biology.
00:00:23.09 And now, I'd like to give you an example
00:00:26.00 of an actual benefit that was derived from that,
00:00:28.22 which is the HIV epidemic
00:00:31.05 and some of the drugs
00:00:33.29 that were developed through structural biology.
00:00:38.17 Once again, we need to thank Max Perutz,
00:00:40.24 who began the field of structural biology
00:00:44.25 and had the great vision
00:00:46.27 that three-dimensional structures
00:00:48.17 not only permit the identification
00:00:51.05 of how the molecules act in living organisms
00:00:55.22 but in fact how the structures can be determined,
00:00:59.06 as well as how drugs can now be designed
00:01:01.27 using the process called structure-based drug design.
00:01:05.28 So, now I'd like to tell you a story
00:01:08.17 of how I have experienced
00:01:12.04 "science for the benefit of humanity."
00:01:15.17 While I was at the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory,
00:01:18.02 I was told
00:01:21.06 that my cryo-cooling experiments and publications
00:01:24.04 probably advanced structural biology
00:01:26.07 by 10 or 20 years.
00:01:28.24 And at the time, you know,
00:01:30.15 10 to 20 years of scientific discovery
00:01:32.27 is really usually not a big deal,
00:01:34.16 and it didn't have any significance to me...
00:01:37.05 until while I was preparing for a presentation this last April,
00:01:42.10 at the Protein Data Bank in Rutgers,
00:01:45.23 they asked me to talk about exactly what I'm telling you:
00:01:49.21 the invention of cryo-crystallography.
00:01:51.25 And while I was doing that,
00:01:53.15 I discovered the AIDS epidemic
00:01:56.23 and the Lazarus effect.
00:01:58.21 And for those of you who don't know
00:02:01.00 what the Lazarus effect is,
00:02:02.24 in medicine, the Lazarus effect
00:02:05.06 is when many people are dying
00:02:07.08 and then some event occurs
00:02:09.24 where these vast numbers of people stop dying.
00:02:12.21 And that's exactly what happened
00:02:14.28 with the AIDS epidemic in 1996.
00:02:18.28 This diagram here is from the United States
00:02:23.00 statistics from the CDC.
00:02:24.28 But let me just tell you first about the worldwide AIDS epidemic,
00:02:27.20 which began in 1980.
00:02:31.06 There have been 76 million people who have been
00:02:36.04 infected with HIV virus since 1980,
00:02:38.23 of whom 39 million have died.
00:02:41.01 And today, worldwide,
00:02:43.02 there were 37 million people still infected.
00:02:47.15 There is no cure for AIDS,
00:02:49.13 as you know,
00:02:51.17 but there is a therapeutic treatment,
00:02:54.13 and that's what I'm gonna explain.
00:02:56.09 So, now if I can talk about the United States,
00:02:58.06 this is the death curve and the infection curve.
00:03:01.13 The red one's the infection occur
00:03:04.18 for AIDS in the United States.
00:03:07.15 So far, since 1980,
00:03:09.15 700,000 Americans have died from AIDS.
00:03:12.28 And as you see,
00:03:15.15 the curve begins in 1980
00:03:18.05 and continually increases,
00:03:20.04 with hundreds of thousands of individuals
00:03:22.23 becoming infected with AI...
00:03:24.10 with HIV virus each year.
00:03:26.16 Since the average lifetime,
00:03:28.10 if you had caught HIV in...
00:03:31.14 during the '80s,
00:03:33.26 was typically 2-4 years,
00:03:35.28 your statistics would move from the red curve to the blue curve,
00:03:39.11 which is the death rate,
00:03:41.14 in about 2 years.
00:03:43.12 And you see that the death rate is continuous
00:03:45.11 from 1980 to 1996.
00:03:47.14 It's a straight line, basically,
00:03:49.16 which means that none of the drugs
00:03:51.24 -- and there were many drugs that were tried --
00:03:53.25 produced any effect on the death rate.
00:03:59.27 In 1984,
00:04:02.10 the HIV virus was identified as being
00:04:06.03 the causal agent of HIV.
00:04:08.01 And then, in 1986,
00:04:10.07 proteins were isolated,
00:04:12.07 one of which is this protein,
00:04:13.25 which is HIV protease,
00:04:15.23 one of the enzymes that makes the HIV virus.
00:04:19.28 The crystal structure was actually determined,
00:04:23.26 the three-dimensional structure, in 1989.
00:04:26.14 And we can thank Merck Laboratory in New Jersey
00:04:29.22 for not only solving the structure,
00:04:31.22 but they published the data to the whole world
00:04:34.20 in the Protein Data Bank in 1989.
00:04:38.28 This gave the opportunity
00:04:41.11 for hundreds of other laboratories
00:04:42.23 to work on the HIV protease.
00:04:47.08 It turned out that inhibitors
00:04:50.07 were actually made,
00:04:51.22 and they were made using structural biology,
00:04:54.13 using cryo-cooling.
00:04:56.11 And in 1996, the therapy was introduced.
00:05:02.18 It was this cocktail of three drugs,
00:05:05.04 of which the HIV protease inhibitor was the most important.
00:05:09.08 And instead of dying, you would...
00:05:12.05 you would live a normal life,
00:05:15.17 with in fact...
00:05:17.24 it was called a manageable disease.
00:05:19.15 And because of that,
00:05:21.28 the individuals did not transfer to the death curve,
00:05:25.21 and you see this precipitous fall
00:05:28.10 in the death curve in 1996.
00:05:30.20 The death rate fell from 96%
00:05:34.04 down to below 20%.
00:05:36.13 So, you can just imagine,
00:05:38.06 between 1980 and 1996,
00:05:41.02 if you had become infected with HIV
00:05:44.04 and you went to your physician,
00:05:45.26 and he would tell you had a 4% chance of surviving.
00:05:50.16 But in 1996,
00:05:53.09 you would go in to... go to your doctor,
00:05:56.03 and he would say, yes,
00:05:58.06 today there's a therapy.
00:05:59.25 You will not be cured of HIV,
00:06:02.09 but it will in fact become a manageable disease.
00:06:05.09 And this dramatic fall in the death rate in 1996
00:06:09.23 is called the Lazarus effect.
00:06:11.25 Tens if not hundreds of thousands of Americans
00:06:15.08 lived who would not live.
00:06:18.18 And basically, the HIV protease inhibitor drugs
00:06:22.21 which were developed
00:06:24.20 were developed years and years faster
00:06:27.00 than they would have been
00:06:29.09 if there had not been structural biology,
00:06:31.09 and as it turns out, cryo-cooling,
00:06:33.17 which participated in that.
00:06:35.29 So, it makes me feel very good
00:06:37.25 that, literally, my research, done 50 years ago,
00:06:41.00 not ending up in dusty pages in a journal
00:06:44.15 but actually saving thousands of lives.
00:06:46.29 That really is science for the benefit of humanity.
00:06:51.29 Experiments that you do,
00:06:54.17 and publications that you make,
00:06:56.03 as a young scientist,
00:06:57.16 will in fact... could contribute very much to the future.
00:06:59.21 So, I hope you've become a little bit inspired
00:07:02.24 with the work that I have done,
00:07:05.01 and the fact that it inspired me,
00:07:06.29 and maybe it will inspire you to continue.
00:07:09.26 Thank you.

Videos in this Talk

Part 1: Cryo-cooling Protein Crystals: The First 52 Years
Audience:
- General Public
- Student
- Researcher
- Educators
- Educators of H. School / Intro Undergrad
- Educators of Adv. Undergrad / Grad
Part 2: HIV and Structural Biology
Audience:
- General Public
- Student
- Researcher
- Educators
- Educators of H. School / Intro Undergrad
- Educators of Adv. Undergrad / Grad

Speaker: David Haas

Total Duration: 0:22:59

Recorded: December 2019

All Talks in Techniques

Talk Overview

In his postdoctoral studies, David Haas set out to reduce radiation damage to protein crystals during X-ray crystallography. In 1970, he published a paper on his invention of macromolecular cryocrystallography – freezing crystals to extend their lifetime in the X-ray beam. The widespread use of the synchrotron beginning in the 1970s made cryo-cooling essential, and today nearly all protein crystal structures deposited in the international Protein Data Bank use this method. In his second presentation, Haas shares an example of how cryocrystallography has aided structure-based drug design.

Speaker Bio

David Haas

David Haas was born in Buffalo NY, and raised in a Texas farming community near the Mexican border. He graduated from the University of Buffalo (now SUNY at Buffalo) in 1962 with a bachelor’s degree in physics, and pursued his PhD studies in the lab of David Harker at the Roswell Park Memorial Institute in… Continue Reading