Data collection and reduction. Crystallographic symmetry Structure determination. Solution of the „phase problem“ Reflections, electron densities and Fourier transforms Structure refinement. Improvement of the molecular model Validation and analysis of structures Comparison of crystallography to other experimental methods as electron microscopy, NMR, and other spectral methods, and to methods of computer simulations by quantum mechanics and methods of empirical potential (molecular dynamics). Finding structures: Structural databases. Practical introduction to the most important databases CSD (for organic molecules) and PDB (the primary repository for 3-D macromolecular structures). Other internet databases important for structural biology. mmCIF and other formats used for archiving structures Comparing structures by tools of structural bioinformatics. Stereochemistry of the building blocks of biomolecules, amino acids and nucleotides. Sequence alignments, relationship between amino acid sequence and protein structure and fold. Methods of structure comparisons. Structural motives of the protein secondary structure, tertiary structure motives, classifications of protein folds. Structures of nucleic acids. I. Helical conformations. II. 3D folding of RNA and DNA.

Further exploration and discussion of recently taught material in X-Ray Crystallography.