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Updated: Jan 22, 2026

Crystallizing Membrane Proteins for Structure Determination using Lipidic Mesophases
Published on: November 21, 2010
Chemical tools for membrane protein structural biology
Qinghai Zhang1, Vadim Cherezov2
1Department of Integrative Structural and Computational Biology, The Scripps Research Institute, La Jolla, CA 92037, USA.
Abstract:
Solving high-resolution structures of membrane proteins has been an important challenge for decades, still lagging far behind that of soluble proteins even with the recent remarkable technological advances in X-ray crystallography and electron microscopy. Central to this challenge is the necessity to isolate and solubilize membrane proteins in a stable, natively folded and functional state, a process influenced by not only the proteins but also their surrounding chemical environment. This review highlights recent community efforts in the development and characterization of novel membrane agents and ligand tools to stabilize individual proteins and protein complexes, which together have accelerated progress in membrane protein structural biology.
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