Successful generation of structural information for fragment-based drug discovery

•Review of fragment–protein crystallisation focusing on ligand introduction.•Hands-on experience with crystallisation in a fragment-based project.•Donation of structure affinity dataset comprising 52 protein–ligand structures.•Influence of ligand properties on the success rate of structure generation.

Fragment-based drug discovery relies upon structural information for efficient compound progression, yet it is often challenging to generate structures with bound fragments. A summary of recent literature reveals that a wide repertoire of experimental procedures is employed to generate ligand-bound crystal structures successfully. We share in-house experience from setting up and executing fragment crystallography in a project that resulted in 55 complex structures. The ligands span five orders of magnitude in affinity and the resulting structures are made available to be of use, for example, for development of computational methods. Analysis of the results revealed that ligand properties such as potency, ligand efficiency (LE) and, to some degree, c log P influence the success of complex structure generation.