Institut Charles Sadron Event

Enzymes are key players of cellular processes. Characterizing their substrate specificity and catalytic mechanism is essential in basic enzymology to understand their normal function and their dysfunctions in link with mutations, in drug discovery to design inhibitors or in synthetic biology to create new catalysts for biotechnological applications. Over the past decade, the advent of X-ray free electron lasers (XFELs) has brought new tools to study biocatalysis (Chapman et al., 2011; Kupitz et al., 2016). This seminar will illustrate the recent (r)evolution from conventional crystallography to time-resolved serial crystallography (TR-SX) and its application in molecular imaging to visualize enzymes in action. Chapman et al. (2011). Femtosecond X-ray protein nanocrystallography. Nature 470, 73–77. Kupitz et al. (2016). Structural enzymology using X-ray free electron lasers. Structural Dynamics 4, 044003.