1. Expression Screening of Integral Membrane Proteins by Fusion to Fluorescent Reporters; Louise E. Bird, Joanne E. Nettleship, Valtteri Järvinen, Heather Rada, Anil Verma and Raymond J Owens

2. Detergents in Membrane Protein Purification and Crystallisation; Anandhi Anandan and Alice Vrielink

3. NMR of Membrane Proteins: Beyond Crystals; Sundaresan Rajesh, Michael Overduin and Boyan B. Bonev 

4. Characterisation of Conformational and Ligand Binding Properties of Membrane Proteins Using Synchrotron Radiation Circular Dichroism (SRCD); Rohanah Hussain and Giuliano Siligardi

5. Membrane Protein Crystallization: Current Trends and Future Perspectives; Joanne L. Parker and Simon Newstead 

6. Crystal Dehydration in Membrane Protein Crystallography; Juan Sánchez-Weatherby and Isabel Moraes

7. Nonlinear Optical Characterization of Membrane Protein Microcrystals and Nanocrystals; Justin A. Newman and Garth J. Simpson

8. Exploiting Microbeams for Membrane Protein Structure Determination; Anna J. Warren, Danny Axford, Neil G. Paterson and Robin L. Owen

9. Applications of the BLEND Software to Crystallographic Data from Membrane Proteins; Pierre Aller, Tian Geng, Gwyndaf Evans and James Foadi 

10. Serial Millisecond Crystallography of Membrane Proteins; Kathrin Jaeger, Florian Dworkowski, Przemyslaw Nogly, Christopher Milne, Meitian Wang and Joerg Standfuss

11. Serial Femtosecond Crystallography of Membrane Proteins; Lan Zhu, Uwe Weierstall, Vadim Cherezov and Wei Liu 

12. Beyond Membrane Protein Structure: Drug Discovery, Dynamics and Difficulties; Philip C. Biggin, Matteo Aldeghi, Michael J. Bodkin and Alexander Heifetz

INDEX

This book reviews current techniques used in membrane protein structural biology, with a strong focus on practical issues. The study of membrane protein structures not only provides a basic understanding of life at the molecular level but also helps in the rational and targeted design of new drugs with reduced side effects.  Today, about 60% of the commercially available drugs target membrane proteins and it is estimated that nearly 30% of proteins encoded in the human genome are membrane proteins. In recent years much effort has been put towards innovative developments to overcome the numerous obstacles associated with the structure determination of membrane proteins.

• Expression screening using fluorescent proteins
  
• The use of detergents in membrane protein research
  
• The use of NMR
  
• Synchrotron developments in membrane protein structural biology
• Visualisation and X-ray data collection of microcrystals
• X-ray diffraction data analysis from multiple crystals
  
• Serial millisecond crystallography
• Serial femtosecond crystallography
• Membrane protein structures in drug discovery

The information provided in this book should be of interest to anyone working in the area of structural biology. Students will find carefully prepared overviews of basic ideas and advanced protein scientists will find the level of detail required to apply the material directly to their day to day work.

Chapters 4, 5, 6, 8 and 9 of this book are published open access under a CC BY 4.0 license at link.springer.com.