Dr Andrea Roberts (Holcombe Assistant Housemistress) has made it into Acta Crystallographica D (Journal) – and not only in it – but one of her figures of the protein which she solved the structure was featured on the front cover. She was also the first author on the article.

In 2004 she started a project to solve the molecular structure of a plant protein called porphobilinogen deaminase (PBGD) using X-Ray crystallography. It took a painstaking two years to find a technique to purify enough of it to grow protein crystals, which was another long case of trial and error. It took a further year to decipher the pattern using some powerful computer programs, but in July 2008 the structure was solved. It is particularly special because it shows a loop of amino acids over the active site that had been previously unsolved for the other species.

You can read the abstract by following this link: http://journals.iucr.org/d/issues/2013/03/00/issconts.html - Congratulations Andi!