Publication Date:
2014-12-17
Description:
Despite recent advances, the structures of many proteins cannot be determined by electron cryomicroscopy because the individual proteins move during irradiation. This blurs the images so that they cannot be aligned with each other to calculate a three-dimensional density. Much of this movement stems from instabilities in the carbon substrates used to support frozen samples in the microscope. Here we demonstrate a gold specimen support that nearly eliminates substrate motion during irradiation. This increases the subnanometer image contrast such that alpha helices of individual proteins are resolved. With this improvement, we determine the structure of apoferritin, a smooth octahedral shell of alpha-helical subunits that is particularly difficult to solve by electron microscopy. This advance in substrate design will enable the solution of currently intractable protein structures.〈br /〉〈br /〉〈a href="https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4296556/" target="_blank"〉〈img src="https://static.pubmed.gov/portal/portal3rc.fcgi/4089621/img/3977009" border="0"〉〈/a〉 〈a href="https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4296556/" target="_blank"〉This paper as free author manuscript - peer-reviewed and accepted for publication〈/a〉〈br /〉〈br /〉〈span class="detail_caption"〉Notes: 〈/span〉Russo, Christopher J -- Passmore, Lori A -- 261151/European Research Council/International -- MC_U105192715/Medical Research Council/United Kingdom -- U105192715/Medical Research Council/United Kingdom -- New York, N.Y. -- Science. 2014 Dec 12;346(6215):1377-80. doi: 10.1126/science.1259530.〈br /〉〈span class="detail_caption"〉Author address: 〈/span〉Medical Research Council (MRC) Laboratory of Molecular Biology, Francis Crick Avenue, Cambridge CB2 0QH, UK. ; Medical Research Council (MRC) Laboratory of Molecular Biology, Francis Crick Avenue, Cambridge CB2 0QH, UK. passmore@mrc-lmb.cam.ac.uk.〈br /〉〈span class="detail_caption"〉Record origin:〈/span〉 〈a href="http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/25504723" target="_blank"〉PubMed〈/a〉
Keywords:
Animals
;
Apoferritins/*chemistry/*ultrastructure
;
Cryoelectron Microscopy/instrumentation/*methods
;
Crystallography, X-Ray
;
*Gold
;
Horses
;
Image Processing, Computer-Assisted
;
Protein Conformation
;
Protein Multimerization
;
Protein Structure, Secondary
;
Ribosomes/*ultrastructure
Print ISSN:
0036-8075
Electronic ISSN:
1095-9203
Topics:
Biology
,
Chemistry and Pharmacology
,
Computer Science
,
Medicine
,
Natural Sciences in General
,
Physics
