Cytochrome c3 from Desulfovibrio gigas

The first structure I refined and wrote up, from the bacterium Jean LeGall discovered.

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A dimeric cytochrome c3, a small protein packed with four haem groups, from Desulfovibrio gigas, refined to 1.2 Å. Comparing it with every cytochrome c3 known at the time showed regions that stay the same despite very different sequences, and a buried water molecule that probably passes electrons between two of the haems (paper).

Carlos Frazão collected the data at EMBL Hamburg in 1997; I processed and refined them and wrote the paper as a young researcher in his group, before he became my PhD supervisor. So it was the first structure I really made my own, and it ties together people who mattered a lot to me: D. gigas is the bacterium Jean LeGall first described in 1963, and Larry Sieker and Maria Arménia Carrondo are among the co-authors.