Crystallography has become one of the important approaches to elucidate structure-function relationship of bio-macromolecules. Recent x-ray crystallography using synchrotron radiation has made a great impact on biology by determination of biologically important proteins that help to understand the functional roles of medicines. Moreover, hydrogen atoms and water hydration surrounding biological macromolecules play important roles in many physiological functions. Thus, the aim of the drug target protein group is to determine the tertiary structure of drug target proteins using several quantum beam technologies and to help designing drug candidates that strongly interact with such proteins.

We are currently working on the determination of the tertiary structure of drug target proteins using both x-ray and neutron diffraction methods. The members of this research group have gathered from three research groups belonging to the Quantum Beam Science Directorate (Molecular Structural Biology Group, Gene Resource Research Group and Computational Biology Group) and the Quantum Bioinformatics Team to achieve the goal of gene expression, protein preparation, and structure analysis