Chemical cross-linking and mass spectrometry as structure determination tools.
Chemical cross-linking is becoming a valuable tool for the high-order structure determination of proteins and protein complexes. Cross-linking methodology is able to provide low-resolution structures when at least something is known already about the proteins under investigation. The suitability of top-down and bottom-up methodologies is discussed and further potential applications of chemical cross-linking of proteins, as well as combinations with other techniques such as hydrogen/deuterium exchange and molecular modeling, are suggested.