On June 23rd, Diana Ribeiro, from the Macromolecular Crystallography & GlycoLab Group at FCT-UNL, was awarded the Prize for Best Poster entitled “Use of Gold Nanoparticles as Additives in Protein Crystallization”, by The International Organization for Biological Crystallization, in the 1st FEBS-INSTRUCT Practical Crystallization Course, Advanced Methods in Macromolecular Crystallization VI, that took place in the Academic and University Center at Nové Hrady, Czech Republic.

The awarded work focuses on a novel approach to help overcome common problems encountered when trying to obtain well-ordered and diffraction-suitable protein crystals and is under the supervision of Prof. Maria João Romão, Dr. Ana Luísa Carvalho and Dr. Ricardo Franco. Describing a systematic study in model proteins as well as real case studies (proteins difficult to crystallize) the project aimed to understand the effect of gold nanoparticles (AuNPs) in the growth of protein crystals by vapour diffusion methods. AuNPs present several advantages, such as the control over size and morphology at the nanometer-scale, as well as having excellent biocompatibility and the ability to be functionalized with different bioactive materials.  These facts have inspired us to use AuNPs to overcome what is usually called "the bottleneck of crystallography", which is protein crystallization.

Reference:

Diana Ribeiro, Alina Kulakova, Pedro Quaresma, Eulália Pereira, Cecília Bonifácio, Maria João Romão, Ricardo Franco, and Ana Luísa Carvalho, Use of Gold Nanoparticles as Additives in Protein Crystallization, Crystal Growth & Design 2014 14 (1), 222-227

http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/cg4014398