Most cellular processes are carried out by molecular machines
that consist of many interacting proteins. These protein
complexes lie at the heart of life science research, but they
are notoriously hard to study. Their abundance is often too low
to extract them directly from cells and generating them with
recombinant methods has been a daunting task. A new technology
to produce multiprotein complexes, developed by researchers at
the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL) in Grenoble,
France, and the Paul Scherrer Institute (PSI) in Villigen,
Switzerland, now makes the biologist's life easier. In a paper
published in the current issue of Nature Methods researchers of
the groups of Imre Berger at EMBL and Michel Steinmetz at the
PSI describe ACEMBL, the first fully automated pipeline for the
production of multiprotein complexes. Requiring much less effort
and materials, the new pipeline will speed up structural studies
of protein complexes and will allow to decipher as yet elusive
molecular mechanisms of h