We are studying drug discovery by targeting membrane proteins, mainly GPCRs and transporters, and investigating the complex structures of receptors and compounds to elucidate the mechanism of action of compounds and lead to novel drug discovery.
In my talk, I would like to discuss our recent results that are relevant to drug discovery, focusing on histamine H4 receptor and bile acid transporter complexed with preS1 sequence of hepatitis B virus, which we have recently analyzed.
I will also discuss recent progress in time-resolved crystallography at SACLA. Dynamic structures of drug targets have the potential to facilitate the discovery of new drugs that would be difficult to discover by studying static 3D structures. In this talk, I will introduce recent instrumental developments and recent results at SACLA, starting from the dynamic structures of microbial rhodopsin and rhodopsin related to GPCRs.