Abstract
Membrane proteins play crucial roles in the mechanism underlying several aspects of cellular function. Nowadays there are so many attempts for structural studies of proteins, because we believe that the structures give us a lot of information to understand the functions and mechanisms. Electron crystallography is a way of the structure analysis by electron microscopy using two-dimensional crystals of the membrane proteins. It is also quite difficult to make the two-dimensional crystals, as well as the three-dimensional crystals for X-ray crystallography. The number of the structures solved by electron crystallography is much less than that solved by X-ray. However, it should be a great advantage that the electron crystallography can analyze the structure of membrane proteins which exist in the lipid bilayer as they were in vivo. In this manuscript, we would introduce the methods of two-dimensional crystallization summarizing only a few successful attempts.
