Crystallization and preliminary X-ray analysis of human Brn-5 transcription factor in complex with DNA

The Brn-5 protein plays an important role in the control of cellular development and belongs to a class of transcription factors that usually contain two domains: the POU homeodomain (POU_HD) and the POU-specific domain (POU_S). Since high-quality crystals suitable for crystallographic studies of the proteins of this class are difficult to obtain, all the known structural information available is for POU_HD and/or POU_S. This paper describes several critical steps that allowed the production of high-quality crystals of the full-length Brn-5 protein complexed with its cognate DNA.