PROBING LARGE PROTEIN SYSTEMS: STRUCTURE: Approach yields first detailed analysis of 456 protein nuclear pore complex

AFTER NINE YEARS of intensive effort, a collaborative team has developed a new structural analysis technique and has used it to obtain the first detailed structure of the nuclear pore complex (NPC)—one of the largest biological assemblies found in cells. The structure doesn’t reveal exactly how the complex works on a molecular level, but it provides a springboard for further studies on its mechanism and helps show how it, and similar structures, may have evolved. The unnamed technique combines experiment with computation to calculate the structures of large biomolecular complexes. The developers of the technique—NPC specialist Michael P. Rout and mass spectrometrist Brian T. Chait of Rockefeller University; computational structural biologist Andrej Sali of the University of California, San Francisco; and their coworkers—used the approach to obtain the structure of the yeast NPC, which is a massive, membraneembedded assembly that controls biomolecular traffic between the nucleus and cytoplasm ( Nature 2007...