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Open Access
Abstract: The article reports methods for the expression and assay of 9-cis-epoxycarotenoid cleavage dioxygenase (NCED), an enzyme involved in the biosynthesis of phytohormone abscisic acid in plants. A method for the preparation of the unstable substrate 9′-cis-neoxanthin from fresh spinach is described. The inhibition of Solanum lycopersicum NCED by a series of aryl hydroxamic acid inhibitors is illustrated, and inhibitors D2 and D4 are assayed against NCED isozymes from Zea mays.
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Jun 2024
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Krios II-Titan Krios II at Diamond
Krios III-Titan Krios III at Diamond
Krios IV-Titan Krios IV at Diamond
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Diamond Proposal Number(s):
[23047]
Open Access
Abstract: The widespread adoption of cryoEM technologies for structural biology has pushed the discipline to new frontiers. A significant worldwide effort has refined the single-particle analysis (SPA) workflow into a reasonably standardized procedure. Significant investments of development time have been made, particularly in sample preparation, microscope data-collection efficiency, pipeline analyses and data archiving. The widespread adoption of specific commercial microscopes, software for controlling them and best practices developed at facilities worldwide has also begun to establish a degree of standardization to data structures coming from the SPA workflow. There is opportunity to capitalize on this moment in the maturation of the field, to capture metadata from SPA experiments and correlate the metadata with experimental outcomes, which is presented here in a set of programs called EMinsight. This tool aims to prototype the framework and types of analyses that could lead to new insights into optimal microscope configurations as well as to define methods for metadata capture to assist with the archiving of cryoEM SPA data. It is also envisaged that this tool will be useful to microscope operators and facilities looking to rapidly generate reports on SPA data-collection and screening sessions.
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Apr 2024
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Open Access
Abstract: High-quality protein samples are an essential requirement of any structural biology experiment. However, producing high-quality protein samples, especially for membrane proteins, is iterative and time-consuming. Membrane protein structural biology remains challenging due to low protein yields and high levels of instability especially when membrane proteins are removed from their native environments. Overcoming the twin problems of compositional and conformational instability requires an understanding of protein size, thermostability, and sample heterogeneity, while a parallelized approach enables multiple conditions to be analyzed simultaneously. We present a method that couples the high-throughput cloning of membrane protein constructs with the transient expression of membrane proteins in human embryonic kidney (HEK) cells and rapid identification of the most suitable conditions for subsequent structural biology applications. This rapid screening method is used routinely in the Membrane Protein Laboratory at Diamond Light Source to identify the most successful protein constructs and conditions while excluding those that will not work. The 96-well format is easily adaptable to enable the screening of constructs, pH, salts, encapsulation agents, and other additives such as lipids.
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Apr 2023
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Krios I-Titan Krios I at Diamond
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Open Access
Abstract: Membrane proteins (MPs) are essential components of all biological membranes, contributing to key cellular functions that include signalling, molecular transport and energy metabolism. Consequently, MPs are important biomedical targets for therapeutics discovery. Despite hardware and software developments in cryo-electron microscopy, as well as MP sample preparation, MPs smaller than 100 kDa remain difficult to study structurally. Significant investment is required to overcome low levels of naturally abundant protein, MP hydrophobicity as well as conformational and compositional instability. Here we have reviewed the sample preparation approaches that have been taken to successfully express, purify and prepare small MPs for analysis by cryo-EM (those with a total solved molecular weight of under 100 kDa), as well as examining the differing approaches towards data processing and ultimately obtaining a structural solution. We highlight common challenges at each stage in the process as well as strategies that have been developed to overcome these issues. Finally, we discuss future directions and opportunities for the study of sub-100 kDa membrane proteins by cryo-EM.
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Mar 2023
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Open Access
Abstract: A BioWF fusion biocatalyst can convert various fatty acid substrates to α-oxoamine (AON) products. The ATP-dependent BioW domain catalyses formation of an acyl-CoA thioester intermediate. The pyridoxal 5’-phosphate (PLP)-dependent BioF domain then accepts various amino acids and catalyses the formation of a range of aminoketone analogues.
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Sep 2022
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I03-Macromolecular Crystallography
Krios II-Titan Krios II at Diamond
Krios IV-Titan Krios IV at Diamond
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Halina
Mikolajek
,
Miriam
Weckener
,
Z. Faidon
Brotzakis
,
Jiandong
Huo
,
Evmorfia V.
Dalietou
,
Audrey
Le Bas
,
Pietro
Sormanni
,
Peter J.
Harrison
,
Philip N.
Ward
,
Steven
Truong
,
Lucile
Moynie
,
Daniel K.
Clare
,
Maud
Dumoux
,
Joshua
Dormon
,
Chelsea
Norman
,
Naveed
Hussain
,
Vinod
Vogirala
,
Raymond J.
Owens
,
Michele
Vendruscolo
,
James
Naismith
Diamond Proposal Number(s):
[27031, 27051, 29666]
Open Access
Abstract: Camelid single-domain antibodies, also known as nanobodies, can be readily isolated from naïve libraries for specific targets but often bind too weakly to their targets to be immediately useful. Laboratory-based genetic engineering methods to enhance their affinity, termed maturation, can deliver useful reagents for different areas of biology and potentially medicine. Using the receptor binding domain (RBD) of the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) spike protein and a naïve library, we generated closely related nanobodies with micromolar to nanomolar binding affinities. By analyzing the structure–activity relationship using X-ray crystallography, cryoelectron microscopy, and biophysical methods, we observed that higher conformational entropy losses in the formation of the spike protein–nanobody complex are associated with tighter binding. To investigate this, we generated structural ensembles of the different complexes from electron microscopy maps and correlated the conformational fluctuations with binding affinity. This insight guided the engineering of a nanobody with improved affinity for the spike protein.
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Jul 2022
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NONE-No attached Diamond beamline
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Charles J.
Buchanan
,
Ben
Gaunt
,
Peter J.
Harrison
,
Yun
Yang
,
Jiwei
Liu
,
Aziz
Khan
,
Andrew M.
Giltrap
,
Audrey
Le Bas
,
Philip N.
Ward
,
Kapil
Gupta
,
Maud
Dumoux
,
Tiong Kit
Tan
,
Lisa
Schimaski
,
Sergio
Daga
,
Nicola
Picchiotti
,
Margherita
Baldassarri
,
Elisa
Benetti
,
Chiara
Fallerini
,
Francesca
Fava
,
Annarita
Giliberti
,
Panagiotis I.
Koukos
,
Matthew J.
Davy
,
Abirami
Lakshminarayanan
,
Xiaochao
Xue
,
Georgios
Papadakis
,
Lachlan P.
Deimel
,
Virgínia
Casablancas-Antràs
,
Timothy D. W.
Claridge
,
Alexandre M. J. J.
Bonvin
,
Quentin J.
Sattentau
,
Simone
Furini
,
Marco
Gori
,
Jiandong
Huo
,
Raymond J.
Owens
,
Christiane
Schaffitzel
,
Imre
Berger
,
Alessandra
Renieri
,
James H.
Naismith
,
Andrew J.
Baldwin
,
Benjamin G.
Davis
Open Access
Abstract: Many pathogens exploit host cell-surface glycans. However, precise analyses of glycan ligands binding with heavily-modified pathogen proteins can be confounded by overlapping sugar signals and/or compound with known experimental constraints. ‘Universal saturation transfer analysis’ (uSTA) builds on existing nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy to provide an automated workflow for quantitating protein-ligand interactions. uSTA reveals that early-pandemic, B-origin lineage SARS-CoV-2 spike trimer binds sialoside sugars in an ‘end-on’ manner. uSTA-guided modelling and a high-resolution cryo-electron microscopy structure implicate the spike N-terminal domain (NTD) and confirm end-on binding. This finding rationalizes the effect of NTD mutations that abolish sugar-binding in SARS CoV 2 variants of concern. Together with genetic variance analyses in early pandemic patient cohorts, this binding implicates a sialylated polylactosamine motif found on tetraantennary N-linked glycoproteins in deeper human lung as potentially relevant to virulence and/or zoonosis.
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Jun 2022
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Krios II-Titan Krios II at Diamond
Krios IV-Titan Krios IV at Diamond
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Diamond Proposal Number(s):
[26464, 28151]
Open Access
Abstract: Developments in cryo-EM have allowed atomic or near-atomic resolution structure determination to become routine in single particle analysis (SPA). However, near-atomic resolution structures determined using cryo-electron tomography and sub-tomogram averaging (cryo-ET STA) are much less routine. In this paper, we show that by collecting cryo-ET STA data using the same conditions as SPA, with both Correlated Double Sampling (CDS) and super-resolution mode, allowed apoferritin to be reconstructed out to the physical Nyquist frequency of the images. Even with just two tilt series, STA yields an apoferritin map at 2.9 Å resolution. These results highlight the exciting potential of cryo-ET STA in the future of protein structure determination. While processing SPA data recorded in super-resolution mode may yield structures surpassing the physical Nyquist limit, processing cryo-ET STA data in super-resolution mode gave no additional resolution benefit. We further show that collecting SPA data in super-resolution mode, with CDS activated, reduces the estimated B-factor, leading to a reduction in the number of particles required to reach a target resolution without compromising data size on disk and area imaged in SerialEM. However, collecting SPA data in CDS does reduce throughput, given that a similar resolution structure, with a slightly larger B-factor, is achievable with optimised parameters for speed in EPU (without CDS).
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Apr 2022
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I03-Macromolecular Crystallography
I04-Macromolecular Crystallography
I24-Microfocus Macromolecular Crystallography
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Jiandong
Huo
,
Halina
Mikolajek
,
Audrey
Le Bas
,
Jordan J.
Clark
,
Parul
Sharma
,
Anja
Kipar
,
Joshua
Dormon
,
Chelsea
Norman
,
Miriam
Weckener
,
Daniel K.
Clare
,
Peter J.
Harrison
,
Julia A.
Tree
,
Karen R.
Buttigieg
,
Francisco J.
Salguero
,
Robert
Watson
,
Daniel
Knott
,
Oliver
Carnell
,
Didier
Ngabo
,
Michael J.
Elmore
,
Susan
Fotheringham
,
Adam
Harding
,
Lucile
Moynie
,
Philip N.
Ward
,
Maud
Dumoux
,
Tessa
Prince
,
Yper
Hall
,
Julian A.
Hiscox
,
Andrew
Owen
,
William
James
,
Miles W.
Carroll
,
James P.
Stewart
,
James
Naismith
,
Raymond
Owens
Diamond Proposal Number(s):
[27031]
Open Access
Abstract: SARS-CoV-2 remains a global threat to human health particularly as escape mutants emerge. There is an unmet need for effective treatments against COVID-19 for which neutralizing single domain antibodies (nanobodies) have significant potential. Their small size and stability mean that nanobodies are compatible with respiratory administration. We report four nanobodies (C5, H3, C1, F2) engineered as homotrimers with pmolar affinity for the receptor binding domain (RBD) of the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein. Crystal structures show C5 and H3 overlap the ACE2 epitope, whilst C1 and F2 bind to a different epitope. Cryo Electron Microscopy shows C5 binding results in an all down arrangement of the Spike protein. C1, H3 and C5 all neutralize the Victoria strain, and the highly transmissible Alpha (B.1.1.7 first identified in Kent, UK) strain and C1 also neutralizes the Beta (B.1.35, first identified in South Africa). Administration of C5-trimer via the respiratory route showed potent therapeutic efficacy in the Syrian hamster model of COVID-19 and separately, effective prophylaxis. The molecule was similarly potent by intraperitoneal injection.
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Sep 2021
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I03-Macromolecular Crystallography
I04-Macromolecular Crystallography
I24-Microfocus Macromolecular Crystallography
|
Shanshan
Zhou
,
Hussain
Bhukya
,
Nicolas
Malet
,
Peter J.
Harrison
,
Dean
Rea
,
Matthew J.
Belousoff
,
Hariprasad
Venugopal
,
Paulina K.
Sydor
,
Kathryn M.
Styles
,
Lijiang
Song
,
Max J.
Cryle
,
Lona M.
Alkhalaf
,
Vilmos
Fulop
,
Gregory L.
Challis
,
Christophe
Corre
Diamond Proposal Number(s):
[8359, 8388]
Abstract: Actinobacteria produce numerous antibiotics and other specialized metabolites that have important applications in medicine and agriculture. Diffusible hormones frequently control the production of such metabolites by binding TetR family transcriptional repressors (TFTRs), but the molecular basis for this remains unclear2. The production of methylenomycin antibiotics in Streptomyces coelicolor A3(2) is initiated by the binding of 2-alkyl-4-hydroxymethylfuran-3-carboxylic acid (AHFCA) hormones to the TFTR MmfR3. Here we report the X-ray crystal structure of an MmfR–AHFCA complex, establishing the structural basis for hormone recognition. We also elucidate the mechanism for DNA release upon hormone binding through the single-particle cryo-electron microscopy structure of an MmfR–operator complex. DNA binding and release assays with MmfR mutants and synthetic AHFCA analogues define the role of individual amino acid residues and hormone functional groups in ligand recognition and DNA release. These findings will facilitate the exploitation of actinobacterial hormones and their associated TFTRs in synthetic biology and in the discovery of new antibiotics.
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Feb 2021
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