Click for Graph

1. Obtain milligrams of pure, soluble protein.
   1. About 60% of sequences express well.
   2. Only one half (prokaryotic) to one quarter (eukaryotic) of these are soluble.

2. Obtain high quality crystals.
   1. Typically hundreds of crystallization conditions are tested.
   2. Crystals must be singular, sufficiently large, and preferably neither needles nor plates.
   3. Crystals with large numbers of copies in the asymmetric unit are problematic.
   4. About half of highly expressed soluble proteins crystallize, but only about one third of these crystals are suitable.

• 1-4% for eukaryotes
• Possibly up to 10-15% for prokaryotes.

By early 2004, of 24,000 targets cloned, 600 had been solved (3%).
Of these, ~500 nonredundant solved targets represents 3% of the 16,000-target goal of Structural Genomics.

by Eric Martz, University of Massachusetts, July 2003 (revised February 2004)
Thanks to Byron Rubin for some insights here.