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Structure of CPV17 polyhedrin determined by the improved analysis of serial femtosecond crystallographic data
DOI:
10.1038/ncomms7435
PMID:
25751308
Authors:
Helen M
Ginn
(University of Oxford)
,
Marc
Messerschmidt
(SLAC)
,
Xiaoyun
Ji
(University of Oxford)
,
Hanwen
Zhang
(University of Oxford)
,
Danny
Axford
(Diamond Light Source)
,
Richard J
Gildea
(Diamond Light Source)
,
Graeme
Winter
(Diamond Light Source)
,
Aaron S.
Brewster
(Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory)
,
Johan
Hattne
(Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory)
,
Armin
Wagner
(Diamond Light Source)
,
Jonathan M
Grimes
(Division of Structural Biology, University of Oxford)
,
Gwyndaf
Evans
(Diamond Light Source)
,
Nicholas K.
Sauter
(Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory)
,
Geoff
Sutton
(University of Oxford)
,
David I
Stuart
(Diamond Light Source)
Co-authored by industrial partner:
No
Type:
Journal Paper
Journal:
Nature Communications
, VOL 6
State:
Published (Approved)
Published:
March 2015

Abstract: The X-ray free-electron laser (XFEL) allows the analysis of small weakly diffracting protein crystals, but has required very many crystals to obtain good data. Here we use an XFEL to determine the room temperature atomic structure for the smallest cytoplasmic polyhedrosis virus polyhedra yet characterized, which we failed to solve at a synchrotron. These protein microcrystals, roughly a micron across, accrue within infected cells. We use a new physical model for XFEL diffraction, which better estimates the experimental signal, delivering a high-resolution XFEL structure (1.75 Å), using fewer crystals than previously required for this resolution. The crystal lattice and protein core are conserved compared with a polyhedrin with less than 10% sequence identity. We explain how the conserved biological phenotype, the crystal lattice, is maintained in the face of extreme environmental challenge and massive evolutionary divergence. Our improved methods should open up more challenging biological samples to XFEL analysis.
Journal Keywords: Biological Sciences; Biophysics; Virology
Subject Areas:
Biology and Bio-materials
Instruments:
I24-Microfocus Macromolecular Crystallography
Other Facilities: SLAC
Added On:
23/11/2015 10:34
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