By summerstudent Beatriz Silveira Augusto >
January 14th. That’s when I got the news: I was going to Berlin! Could there be a better way to start the year? I started planning everything in advance, since I would have about six months to prepare, in Brazil, the foundation for my experiments at the HZB. I thought I would be calm, ready, and organised when the time arrived. In theory, it was the perfect plan. In practice… not so much.
Nothing worked at first
I had to establish a protocol to express, purify, and crystallise a protein in order to run a fragment screening at HZB, which is a technique used to find small molecules that bind to a protein and can serve as starting points for identifying chemical structures that may later be developed into lead compounds for drug development. I tried until the very last minute, but just weeks before my trip, I had nothing.
Protocols didn’t work, results didn’t come, and everything I had carefully prepared seemed useless. We had to change the plan. So, we came up with a backup: a different protein, and different protocols; I packed my bags, crossed my fingers, and flew to Berlin hoping that at least something would work this time. And, to my surprise, it did!
Then thing started to move
From the very first week at HZB, things started to move, and I finally began to see some results. I had guidance, support, and a warm welcome from the Macromolecular Crystallography (MX) group. Even the long shifts at the beamline are enjoyable, how are you supposed to complain when you’re standing in a place that looks straight out of a sci-fi movie?
At the lab, one of my tasks is to produce and handle the protein crystals. I soak them with the small compounds we want to test and leave them to incubate. After that, I mount the crystals onto special sample holders, and they are flash-cooled with liquid nitrogen to preserve their structure. Then comes the careful process of aligning the crystals with the X-ray beam to collect diffraction data. It’s a task that requires precision and patience and in the end it is really interesting to see how those tiny crystals can reveal so much about the proteins.
But science is only part of this story. After work and on weekends, we’ve been exploring Berlin’s lakes, parks and cuisine. And we even managed a trip to Poland. So, in the end, this summer didn’t go as planned. It went better.
About the author: Beatriz Silveira Augusto is working with the Macromolecular Crystallography (MX) team headed by Dr. Manfred Weiss at HZB during the ISSP 2025 program, and under the supervision of Dr. Melanie Oelker. She is an undergraduate student in Medical Physics at the University of São Paulo (USP), Brazil, currently engaged in structural biology and crystallography.