From atoms to proteins

The investigation of biological macromolecules and the characteristics that determine their function has been of particular interest over the last decades. Here we overview some modern approaches for making the most of the 3-D protein structural information, with a distinctive emphasis on macromolecular crystallography and complementary techniques used to establish the structure-function relationship. A tight link between the biology of the cellular processes and the underlying chemistry of protein function governs the flow of the presented material. The reader will be lead through the basic principles of protein structure analysis and the means to capture the characteristics that portray the function. The techniques exploiting high-resolution data and allowing quantification of molecular motion and structure-activity relationship are given particular attention.