Recent insights into the three-dimensional molecular packing structure of native type I collagen

The structure formed by the packing of collagen molecules within fibrous tissue has been a matter of some considerable speculation and debate for decades. Its importance is due to the fact that the arrangement of collagen molecules within fibrils must certainly impart the basis of the strength and integrity of mammalian connective tissue, and determines how collagen fibrils interact with other extracellular matrix components. We recently reported a solution for the structure of collagen type I in situ [1]. This was obtained by modelling the x-ray fibre diagram and then solving the phase problem via MIR to produce our electron density map, thus avoiding any possible bias towards a particular structural model. In this paper, w