The use of protein X-ray crystallography for structure-based design of small-molecule drugs is well-documented and includes several notable success stories. However, it is less well-known that structural biology has emerged as a major tool for the design of novel vaccine antigens. Here, we review the important contributions that protein crystallography has made so far to vaccine research and development. We discuss several examples of the crystallographic characterization of vaccine antigen structures, alone or in complexes with ligands or receptors. We cover the critical role of high-resolution epitope mapping by reviewing structures of complexes between antigens and their cognate neutralizing, or protective, antibody fragments. Most importantly, we provide recent examples where structural insights obtained via protein crystallography have been used to design novel optimized vaccine antigens. This review aims to illustrate the value of protein crystallography in the emerging discipline of structural vaccinology and its impact on the rational design of vaccines.
Keywords: Staphylococcus aureus; crystallization; human immunodeficiency virus (HIV); meningitis; paratope; protein engineering; respiratory syncytial virus (RSV).