Exploring daring new ideas, which may transform common wisdom – this is the aim of the relatively young Volkswagen Foundation initiative called Experiment!.

Dr Masato Akutsu, group leader at the IBC2 and BMLS, succeeded in the highly competitive call for bold research concepts. He secured just under 100.000 € to prove a concept which has the potential to revolutionize structure determination by protein crystallography.

This process is currently often hampered by the ability of proteins to crystallize. Akutsu now proposes to develop a technology, which overcomes the need for conventional protein crystals. If successful, this will open the avenue for structure determination of a long list of proteins for which high-resolution structures could so far not be obtained.