Soft Matter Perspective on Protein Crystal Assembly

TL;DR

This review explores how soft matter physics models, especially patchy particle models, can provide insights into protein crystallization, highlighting analogies, challenges, and future research directions in protein self-assembly.

Contribution

It introduces the application of colloidal assembly models to understand protein crystallization, emphasizing the explanatory power and limitations of these models.

Findings

Patchy particle models effectively describe protein assembly.

Challenges exist in guiding specific protein crystallization.

Future research directions include refining models and understanding self-assembly mechanisms.

Abstract

Crystallography may be the gold standard of protein structure determination, but obtaining the necessary high-quality crystals is also in some ways akin to prospecting for the precious metal. The tools and models developed in soft matter physics to understand colloidal assembly offer some insights into the problem of crystallizing proteins. This topical review describes the various analogies that have been made between proteins and colloids in that context. We highlight the explanatory power of patchy particle models, but also the challenges of providing guidance for crystallizing specific proteins. We conclude with a presentation of possible future research directions. This article is intended for soft matter scientists interested in protein crystallization as a self-assembly problem, and as an introduction to the pertinent physics literature for protein scientists more generally.