Solving structures of protein complexes by molecular replacement with Phaser

Molecular replacement (MR) generally becomes more difficult as the number of components in the asymmetric unit requiring separate MR models (i.e. the dimensionality of the search) increases. When the proportion of the total scattering contributed by each search component is small, the signal in the search for each component in isolation is weak or non-existent. Maximum-likelihood MR functions enable complex asymmetric units to be built up from individual components with a ;tree search with pruning' approach. This method, as implemented in the automated search procedure of the program Phaser, has been very successful in solving many previously intractable MR problems. However, there are a number of cases in…