High Resolution Separation and Analysis of Biological Macromolecules Part B: Applications

1996 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
High Resolution ◽  
Biological Macromolecules

High-resolution scanning electron microscopy in biology

1990 ◽  
Vol 48 (3) ◽  
pp. 14-15
Author(s):  
Keiichi Tanaka
Keyword(s):  
High Resolution ◽  
Immunoglobulin M ◽  
Metal Coating ◽  
Biological Macromolecules ◽  
Ultrahigh Resolution ◽  
Preparation Methods ◽  
Low Contrast ◽  
Almost All ◽  
Charging Effect ◽  
Scanning Electron

With the development of scanning electron microscope (SEM) with ultrahigh resolution, SEM became to play an important role in not only cytology but also molecular biology. However, the preparation methods observing tiny specimens with such high resolution SEM are not yet established.Although SEM specimens are usually coated with metals for getting electrical conductivity, it is desirable to avoid the metal coating for high resolution SEM, because the coating seriously affects resolution at this level, unless special coating techniques are used. For avoiding charging effect without metal coating, we previously reported a method in which polished carbon plates were used as substrate. In the case almost all incident electrons penetrate through the specimens and do not accumulate in them, when the specimens are smaller than 10nm. By this technique some biological macromolecules including ribosomes, ferritin, immunoglobulin G were clearly observed.Unfortunately some other molecules such as apoferritin, thyroglobulin and immunoglobulin M were difficult to be observed only by the method, because they had very low contrast and were easily damaged by electron beam.

High-Resolution Cryo-Electron Microscopy of Biological Macromolecules

1990 ◽  
Vol 48 (1) ◽  
pp. 126-127
Author(s):  
Yoshinori Fujiyoshi
Keyword(s):  
Electron Microscopy ◽  
High Resolution ◽  
Diffraction Pattern ◽  
Superfluid Helium ◽  
Copper Phthalocyanine ◽  
Optical Diffraction ◽  
Irradiation Damage ◽  
Biological Macromolecules ◽  
Cross Sectional ◽  
Instrumental Resolution

The resolution of direct images of biological macromolecules is normally restricted to far less than 0.3 nm. This is not due instrumental resolution, but irradiation damage. The damage to biological macromolecules may expect to be reduced when they are cooled to a very low temperature. We started to develop a new cryo-stage for a high resolution electron microscopy in 1983, and successfully constructed a superfluid helium stage for a 400 kV microscope by 1986, whereby chlorinated copper-phthalocyanine could be photographed to a resolution of 0.26 nm at a stage temperature of 1.5 K. We are continuing to develop the cryo-microscope and have developed a cryo-microscope equipped with a superfluid helium stage and new cryo-transfer device.The New cryo-microscope achieves not only improved resolution but also increased operational ease. The construction of the new super-fluid helium stage is shown in Fig. 1, where the cross sectional structure is shown parallel to an electron beam path. The capacities of LN2 tank, LHe tank and the pot are 1400 ml, 1200 ml and 3 ml, respectively. Their surfaces are placed with gold to minimize thermal radiation. Consumption rates of liquid nitrogen and liquid helium are 170 ml/hour and 140 ml/hour, respectively. The working time of this stage is more than 7 hours starting from full LN2 and LHe tanks. Instrumental resolution of our cryo-stage cooled to 4.2 K was confirmed to be 0.20 nm by an optical diffraction pattern from the image of a chlorinated copper-phthalocyanine crystal. The image and the optical diffraction pattern are shown in Fig. 2 a, b, respectively.

Three-dimensional crystallization of membrane proteins

1988 ◽  
Vol 21 (4) ◽  
pp. 429-477 ◽  
Author(s):  
W. Kühlbrandt
Keyword(s):  
High Resolution ◽  
Membrane Proteins ◽  
Membrane Protein ◽  
Protein Complexes ◽  
Three Dimensional ◽  
Biological Macromolecules ◽  
X Ray ◽  
X Ray Crystallography ◽  
Membrane Protein Complexes ◽  
Essential Prerequisite

As recently as 10 years ago, the prospect of solving the structure of any membrane protein by X-ray crystallography seemed remote. Since then, the threedimensional (3-D) structures of two membrane protein complexes, the bacterial photosynthetic reaction centres of Rhodopseudomonas viridis (Deisenhofer et al. 1984, 1985) and of Rhodobacter sphaeroides (Allen et al. 1986, 1987 a, 6; Chang et al. 1986) have been determined at high resolution. This astonishing progress would not have been possible without the pioneering work of Michel and Garavito who first succeeded in growing 3-D crystals of the membrane proteins bacteriorhodopsin (Michel & Oesterhelt, 1980) and matrix porin (Garavito & Rosenbusch, 1980). X-ray crystallography is still the only routine method for determining the 3-D structures of biological macromolecules at high resolution and well-ordered 3-D crystals of sufficient size are the essential prerequisite.

Small-angle scattering: a view on the properties, structures and structural changes of biological macromolecules in solution

2003 ◽  
Vol 36 (2) ◽  
pp. 147-227 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michel H. J. Koch ◽  
Patrice Vachette ◽  
Dmitri I. Svergun
Keyword(s):  
High Resolution ◽  
Neutron Scattering ◽  
Small Angle ◽  
Structure Factor ◽  
Structural Changes ◽  
Biological Macromolecules ◽  
Time Resolved ◽  
Scattering Intensity ◽  
X Ray ◽  
Angle Scattering

1. Introduction 1482. Basics of X-ray and neutron scattering 1492.1 Elastic scattering of electromagnetic radiation by a single electron 1492.2 Scattering by assemblies of electrons 1512.3 Anomalous scattering and long wavelengths 1532.4 Neutron scattering 1532.5 Transmission and attenuation 1553. Small-angle scattering from solutions 1563.1 Instrumentation 1563.2 The experimental scattering pattern 1573.3 Basic scattering functions 1593.4 Global structural parameters 1613.4.1 Monodisperse systems 1613.4.2 Polydisperse systems and mixtures 1633.5 Characteristic functions 1644. Modelling 1664.1 Spherical harmonics 1664.2 Shannon sampling 1694.3 Shape determination 1704.3.1 Modelling with few parameters: molecular envelopes 1714.3.2 Modelling with many parameters: bead models 1734.4 Modelling domain structure and missing parts of high-resolution models 1784.5 Computing scattering patterns from atomic models 1844.6 Rigid-body refinement 1875. Applications 1905.1 Contrast variation studies of ribosomes 1905.2 Structural changes and catalytic activity of the allosteric enzyme ATCase 1916. Interactions between molecules in solution 2036.1 Linearizing the problem for moderate interactions: the second virial coefficient 2046.2 Determination of the structure factor 2057. Time-resolved measurements 2118. Conclusions 2159. Acknowledgements 21610. References 216A self-contained presentation of the main concepts and methods for interpretation of X-ray and neutron-scattering patterns of biological macromolecules in solution, including a reminder of the basics of X-ray and neutron scattering and a brief overview of relevant aspects of modern instrumentation, is given. For monodisperse solutions the experimental data yield the scattering intensity of the macromolecules, which depends on the contrast between the solvent and the particles as well as on their shape and internal scattering density fluctuations, and the structure factor, which is related to the interactions between macromolecules. After a brief analysis of the information content of the scattering intensity, the two main approaches for modelling the shape and/or structure of macromolecules and the global minimization schemes used in the calculations are presented. The first approach is based, in its more advanced version, on the spherical harmonics approximation and relies on few parameters, whereas the second one uses bead models with thousands of parameters. Extensions of bead modelling can be used to model domain structure and missing parts in high-resolution structures. Methods for computing the scattering patterns from atomic models including the contribution of the hydration shell are discussed and examples are given, which also illustrate that significant differences sometimes exist between crystal and solution structures. These differences are in some cases explainable in terms of rigid-body motions of parts of the structures. Results of two extensive studies – on ribosomes and on the allosteric protein aspartate transcarbamoylase – illustrate the application of the various methods. The unique bridge between equilibrium structures and thermodynamic or kinetic aspects provided by scattering techniques is illustrated by modelling of intermolecular interactions, including crystallization, based on an analysis of the structure factor and recent time-resolved work on assembly and protein folding.

scholarly journals High-resolution structure determination of sub-100 kilodalton complexes using conventional cryo-EM

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mark A. Herzik ◽  
Mengyu Wu ◽  
Gabriel C. Lander
Keyword(s):  
High Resolution ◽  
Structure Determination ◽  
Drug Target ◽  
Phase Plate ◽  
Biological Macromolecules ◽  
Cryo Electron Microscopy ◽  
Transmission Electron ◽  
High Resolution Structure ◽  
Resolution Structure

Determining high-resolution structures of biological macromolecules with masses of less than 100 kilodaltons (kDa) has long been a goal of the cryo-electron microscopy (cryo-EM) community. While the Volta Phase Plate has enabled cryo-EM structure determination of biological specimens of this size range, use of this instrumentation is not yet fully automated and can present technical challenges. Here, we show that conventional defocus-based cryo-EM methodologies can be used to determine the high-resolution structures of specimens amassing less than 100 kDa using a transmission electron microscope operating at 200 keV coupled with a direct electron detector. Our ~2.9 Å structure of alcohol dehydrogenase (82 kDa) proves that bound ligands can be resolved with high fidelity, indicating that these methodologies can be used to investigate the molecular details of drug-target interactions. Our ~2.8 Å and ~3.2 Å resolution structures of methemoglobin demonstrate that distinct conformational states can be identified within a dataset for proteins as small as 64 kDa. Furthermore, we provide the first sub-nanometer cryo-EM structure of a protein smaller than 50 kDa.

scholarly journals How Wide Is the Window Opened by High-Resolution Relaxometry on the Internal Dynamics of Proteins in Solution?

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Albert Smith ◽  
Nicolas Bolik-Coulon ◽  
Matthias Ernst ◽  
Beat Meier ◽  
Fabien Ferrage
Keyword(s):  
High Resolution ◽  
Rotational Diffusion ◽  
Relevant Information ◽  
Biological Macromolecules ◽  
Internal Dynamics ◽  
Amount Of Information ◽  
Nanosecond Range

Here we apply the detectors approach to probe the amount of information in high-resolution relaxometry measurements in biological macromolecules in solution. We show that high-resolution relaxometry provides new relevant information in the nanosecond range and that the additional range of information is all the more large as the overall rotational diffusion is slow.

scholarly journals Long shelf-life streptavidin support-films suitable for electron microscopy of biological macromolecules

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bong-Gyoon Han ◽  
Zoe Watson ◽  
Hannah Kang ◽  
Arto Pulk ◽  
Kenneth H. Downing ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Electron Microscopy ◽  
High Resolution ◽  
Shelf Life ◽  
Single Crystals ◽  
Convenient Method ◽  
Test Specimen ◽  
Biological Macromolecules ◽  
Crystalline Order ◽  
Binding Function ◽  
Biotin Binding

ABSTRACTWe describe a rapid and convenient method of growing streptavidin (SA) monolayer crystals directly on holey-carbon EM grids. As expected, these SA monolayer crystals retain their biotin-binding function and crystalline order through a cycle of embedding in trehalose and, later, its removal. This fact allows one to prepare, and store for later use, EM grids on which SA monolayer crystals serve as an affinity substrate for preparing specimens of biological macromolecules. In addition, we report that coating the lipid-tail side of trehalose-embedded monolayer crystals with evaporated carbon appears to improve the consistency with which well-ordered, single crystals are observed to span over entire, 2 μm holes of the support films. Randomly biotinylated 70 S ribosomes are used as a test specimen to show that these support films can be used to obtain a high-resolution cryo-EM structure.

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