RNA inner workings partly unveiled in Stan...( nother thing entirely said Kornberg....)

"These two papers are both quite astonishing in what they reveal," he added. "One because it shows us this protein finger that pokes through and because we can intuit all the rest of the structure around the polymerase, and the other paper because it shows this amazing dynamic mechanism by which the RNA is separated from DNA."

To find good diffracting crystals out of the hundreds made, the researchers used a new automatic robotic screening system developed at SSRL with grants from the National Institutes of Health. The automated screening system stores the tiny frozen crystals on nylon loops at the end of metal pins. A robotic arm retrieves each pin and aligns the crystal in the path of the X-ray beam. The robot can automatically test 300 samples without the need for researchers to carry out a manual transfer for each sample as was done in the past.

"It saves a lot of time while optimizing the quality of the data," said SSRL scientist Mike Soltis, PhD, head of the macromolecular crystallography group. "With the new system, the Kornberg group screened 130 crystals in seven hours without losing any. Two weeks earlier, they had manually mounted 100 crystals in 24 hours, losing a few crystals and much sleep in the process."

The Kornberg group plans to build upon their findings and continue to explore the inner workings of RNA polymerase. "Because we have overcome technical problems in making the complexes, it opens a huge opportunity for a lot of other variations of this. We can do a lot of experiments that we couldn't do before," said Westover.

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Contact: Mitzi Baker
mitzibaker@stanford.edu
650-725-2106
Stanford University Medical Center
12-Feb-2004