I studied Biochemistry at the University of Oxford during a period that one of my professors described as a “golden age of structural biology”. The first crystal structures of myosin, the F1-ATPase, the nucleosome, nitric oxide synthase and the KcsA potassium channel were solved and made their way into our lectures. I was fascinated by the beauty of these structures, the way they would suddenly make sense of decades’ worth of data and the insight they gave into biology.
My initial problem was that I struggled to grow crystals that were anything like as good as those prepared by others in the lab. In desperation I tried adding a cocktail of antibiotics that were known to bind the 30S ribosomes following a suggestion that adding ligands might aid the crystallisation process. Not only did it help me grow crystals but it also led to a structure of the 30S in the presence of three antibiotics (streptomycin, paromomycin and spectinomycin) which gave some fascinating insights into ribosome function and was eventually published alongside the structure of the 30S subunit.