High-throughput (HT) protein crystallography is severely impeded by the relatively low success rate of protein crystallization. Proteins whose structures are not solved in the HT pipeline owing to attrition in any phase of the project are referred to as the high-hanging fruit, in contrast to those proteins that yielded good-quality crystals and crystal structures, which are referred to as low-hanging fruit. It has previously been shown that proteins that do not crystallize in the wild-type form can have their surfaces engineered by site-directed mutagenesis in order to create patches of low conformational entropy that are conducive to forming intermolecular interactions. The application of this method to selected proteins from the Bacillus subtilis genome which failed to crystallize in the HT mode is now reported. In this paper, the crystal structure of the product of the YdeN gene is reported. Of three prepared double mutants, i.e. E124A/K127A, E167A/E169A and K88A/Q89A, the latter gave high-quality crystals and the crystal structure was solved by SAD at 1.8 Å resolution. The protein is a canonical α/β hydrolase, with an active site that is accessible to solvent.

Nitroalkane oxidase (NAO), a flavoprotein cloned and purified from Fusarium oxysporum, catalyzes the oxidation of neutral nitroalkanes to the corresponding aldehydes or ketones, with the production of H2O2 and nitrite. In this paper, the crystallization and preliminary X-ray data analysis of three crystal forms of active nitroalkane oxidase are described. The first crystal form belongs to a trigonal space group (either P3121 or P3221, with unit-cell parameters a = b = 103.8, c = 487.0 Å) and diffracts to at least 1.6 Å resolution. Several data sets were collected using 2θ and κ geometry in order to obtain a complete data set to 2.07 Å resolution. Solvent-content and Matthews coefficient analysis suggests that crystal form 1 contains two homotetramers per asymmetric unit. Crystal form 2 (P212121; a = 147.3, b = 153.5, c = 169.5 Å) and crystal form 3 (P31 or P32; a = b = 108.9, c = 342.5 Å) are obtained from slightly different conditions and also contain two homotetramers per asymmetric unit, but have different solvent contents. A three-wavelength MAD data set was collected from selenomethionine-enriched NAO (SeMet-NAO) in crystal form 3 and will be used for phasing.