Artificial intelligence to solve the X-ray crystallography phase problem: a case study report.

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Irene Barbarin-Bocahu ◽  
Marc GRAILLE
Keyword(s):  
Structure Prediction ◽  
Three Dimensional ◽  
Structural Similarity ◽  
Molecular Replacement ◽  
Learning Approaches ◽  
Phase Problem ◽  
Data Set ◽  
X Ray ◽  
X Ray Crystallography ◽  
Eukaryotic Mrnas

The determination of three dimensional structures of macromolecules is one of the actual challenge in biology with the ultimate objective of understanding their function. So far, X-ray crystallography is the most popular method to solve structure, but this technique relies on the generation of diffracting crystals. Once a correct data set has been obtained, the calculation of electron density maps requires to solve the so-called phase problem using different approaches. The most frequently used technique is molecular replacement, which relies on the availability of the structure of a protein sharing strong structural similarity with the studied protein. Its success rate is directly correlated with the quality of the models used for the molecular replacement trials. The availability of models as accurate as possible is then definitely critical. Very recently, a breakthrough step has been made in the field of protein structure prediction thanks to the use of machine learning approaches as implemented in the AlphaFold or RoseTTAFold structure prediction programs. Here, we describe how these recent improvements helped us to solve the crystal structure of a protein involved in the nonsense-mediated mRNA decay pathway (NMD), an mRNA quality control pathway dedicated to the elimination of eukaryotic mRNAs harboring premature stop codons.

Ulrich Wolfgang Arndt. 23 April 1924 — 24 March 2006

2014 ◽  
Vol 60 ◽  
pp. 39-55
Author(s):  
R. A. Crowther ◽  
A. G. W. Leslie
Keyword(s):  
Protein Structures ◽  
Three Dimensional ◽  
Direct Methods ◽  
Biological Molecules ◽  
Data Generation ◽  
Data Set ◽  
X Ray ◽  
X Ray Crystallography ◽  
Whole Process ◽  
Wide Range

Ulrich (Uli) Arndt was a physicist and engineer whose contributions to the development of a wide range of instrumentation for X-ray crystallography played an important part in our ability to solve the atomic structure of large biological molecules. Such detailed information about protein structures has for the past 50 years underpinned the huge advances in the field of molecular biology. His innovations spanned all aspects of data generation and collection, from improvements in X-ray tubes, through novel designs for diffractometers and cameras to film scanners and more direct methods of X-ray detection. When he started in the field, the intensities of individual X-ray reflections were often estimated by eye from films. By the end of his career the whole process of collecting from a crystal a three-dimensional data set, possibly comprising hundreds of thousands of measurements, was fully automated and very rapid.

scholarly journals Whole-pattern fitting technique in serial femtosecond nanocrystallography

IUCrJ ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
pp. 127-138 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ruben A. Dilanian ◽  
Sophie R. Williams ◽  
Andrew V. Martin ◽  
Victor A. Streltsov ◽  
Harry M. Quiney
Keyword(s):  
Powder Diffraction ◽  
Diffraction Data ◽  
Three Dimensional ◽  
Monte Carlo Integration ◽  
Data Set ◽  
X Ray ◽  
X Ray Crystallography ◽  
Small Crystals ◽  
Crystallite Structure ◽  
Serial Crystallography

Serial femtosecond X-ray crystallography (SFX) has created new opportunities in the field of structural analysis of protein nanocrystals. The intensity and timescale characteristics of the X-ray free-electron laser sources used in SFX experiments necessitate the analysis of a large collection of individual crystals of variable shape and quality to ultimately solve a single, average crystal structure. Ensembles of crystals are commonly encountered in powder diffraction, but serial crystallography is different because each crystal is measured individually and can be orientedviaindexing and merged into a three-dimensional data set, as is done for conventional crystallography data. In this way, serial femtosecond crystallography data lie in between conventional crystallography data and powder diffraction data, sharing features of both. The extremely small sizes of nanocrystals, as well as the possible imperfections of their crystallite structure, significantly affect the diffraction pattern and raise the question of how best to extract accurate structure-factor moduli from serial crystallography data. Here it is demonstrated that whole-pattern fitting techniques established for one-dimensional powder diffraction analysis can be feasibly extended to higher dimensions for the analysis of merged SFX diffraction data. It is shown that for very small crystals, whole-pattern fitting methods are more accurate than Monte Carlo integration methods that are currently used.

scholarly journals ContaMinerand ContaBase: a webserver and database for early identification of unwantedly crystallized protein contaminants

2016 ◽  
Vol 49 (6) ◽  
pp. 2252-2258 ◽  
Author(s):  
Arnaud Hungler ◽  
Afaque Momin ◽  
Kay Diederichs ◽  
Stefan, T. Arold
Keyword(s):  
Molecular Replacement ◽  
Host Organism ◽  
Phase Problem ◽  
Protein Fusion ◽  
Web Based ◽  
X Ray ◽  
X Ray Crystallography ◽  
Expression Host ◽  
Protein X ◽  
Erroneous Data

Solving the phase problem in protein X-ray crystallography relies heavily on the identity of the crystallized protein, especially when molecular replacement (MR) methods are used. Yet, it is not uncommon that a contaminant crystallizes instead of the protein of interest. Such contaminants may be proteins from the expression host organism, protein fusion tags or proteins added during the purification steps. Many contaminants co-purify easily, crystallize and give good diffraction data. Identification of contaminant crystals may take time, since the presence of the contaminant is unexpected and its identity unknown. A webserver (ContaMiner) and a contaminant database (ContaBase) have been established, to allow fast MR-based screening of crystallographic data against currently 62 known contaminants. The web-basedContaMiner(available at http://strube.cbrc.kaust.edu.sa/contaminer/) currently produces results in 5 min to 4 h. The program is also available in a github repository and can be installed locally.ContaMinerenables screening of novel crystals at synchrotron beamlines, and it would be valuable as a routine safety check for `crystallization and preliminary X-ray analysis' publications. Thus, in addition to potentially saving X-ray crystallographers much time and effort,ContaMinermight considerably lower the risk of publishing erroneous data.

scholarly journals A suite of software for processing MicroED data of extremely small protein crystals

2014 ◽  
Vol 47 (3) ◽  
pp. 1140-1145 ◽  
Author(s):  
Matthew G. Iadanza ◽  
Tamir Gonen
Keyword(s):  
Structure Determination ◽  
Ad Hoc ◽  
Source Code ◽  
Three Dimensional ◽  
Molecular Replacement ◽  
X Ray ◽  
X Ray Crystallography ◽  
Software Packages ◽  
Transmission Electron ◽  
Standard Software

Electron diffraction of extremely small three-dimensional crystals (MicroED) allows for structure determination from crystals orders of magnitude smaller than those used for X-ray crystallography. MicroED patterns, which are collected in a transmission electron microscope, were initially not amenable to indexing and intensity extraction by standard software, which necessitated the development of a suite of programs for data processing. The MicroED suite was developed to accomplish the tasks of unit-cell determination, indexing, background subtraction, intensity measurement and merging, resulting in data that can be carried forward to molecular replacement and structure determination. Thisad hocsolution has been modified for more general use to provide a means for processing MicroED data until the technique can be fully implemented into existing crystallographic software packages. The suite is written in Python and the source code is available under a GNU General Public License.

scholarly journals Geometric Constraints for the Phase Problem in X-Ray Crystallography

10.29007/p2pj ◽  
2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Corinna Heldt ◽  
Alexander Bockmayr
Keyword(s):  
Electron Density Distribution ◽  
Fourier Coefficients ◽  
Three Dimensional ◽  
Geometric Constraints ◽  
Dimensional Structure ◽  
Biological Macromolecules ◽  
Phase Problem ◽  
X Ray ◽  
X Ray Crystallography

X-ray crystallography is one of the main methods to establish the three-dimensional structure of biological macromolecules. In an X-ray experiment, one can measure only the magnitudes of the complex Fourier coefficients of the electron density distribution under study, but not their phases. The problem of recovering the lost phases is called the phase problem. Building on earlier work by Lunin/Urzhumtsev/Bockmayr, we extend their constraint-based approach to the phase problem by adding further 0-1 linear programming constraints. These constraints describe geometric properties of proteins and increase the quality of the solutions. The approach has been implemented using SCIP and CPLEX, first computational results are presented here.

scholarly journals Computational models in the service of X-ray and cryo-EM structure determination

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andriy Kryshtafovych ◽  
John Moult ◽  
Reinhard Albrecht ◽  
Geoffrey Chang ◽  
Kinlin Chao ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Structure Determination ◽  
Structure Prediction ◽  
Computational Models ◽  
Molecular Replacement ◽  
X Ray ◽  
X Ray Crystallography ◽  
Experimental Approaches ◽  
Structure Accuracy ◽  
Posteriori Analysis ◽  
Experimental Structure

CASP (Critical Assessment of Structure prediction) conducts community experiments to determine the state of the art in computing protein structure from amino acid sequence. The process relies on the experimental community providing information about not yet public or about to be solved structures, for use as targets. For some targets, the experimental structure is not solved in time for use in CASP. Calculated structure accuracy improved dramatically in this round, implying that models should now be much more useful for resolving many sorts of experimental difficulty. To test this, selected models for seven unsolved targets were provided to the experimental groups. These models were from the AlphaFold2 group, who overall submitted the most accurate predictions in CASP14. Four targets were solved with the aid of the models, and, additionally, the structure of an already solved target was improved. An a-posteriori analysis showed that in some cases models from other groups would also be effective. This paper provides accounts of the successful application of models to structure determination, including molecular replacement for X-ray crystallography, backbone tracing and sequence positioning in a Cryo-EM structure, and correction of local features. The results suggest that in future there will be greatly increased synergy between computational and experimental approaches to structure determination.

Difference Fourier Analysis of Glucose Embedded and Frozen Hydrated Purple Membrane

1982 ◽  
Vol 40 ◽  
pp. 74-75
Author(s):  
Jules S. Jaffe ◽  
Robert M. Glaeser
Keyword(s):  
Purple Membrane ◽  
Data Set ◽  
High Resolution Data ◽  
X Ray ◽  
X Ray Crystallography ◽  
Fourier Techniques ◽  
Versus Protein ◽  
The Difference ◽  
Difference Fourier ◽  
Ideal Method

Although difference Fourier techniques are standard in X-ray crystallography it has only been very recently that electron crystallographers have been able to take advantage of this method. We have combined a high resolution data set for frozen glucose embedded Purple Membrane (PM) with a data set collected from PM prepared in the frozen hydrated state in order to visualize any differences in structure due to the different methods of preparation. The increased contrast between protein-ice versus protein-glucose may prove to be an advantage of the frozen hydrated technique for visualizing those parts of bacteriorhodopsin that are embedded in glucose. In addition, surface groups of the protein may be disordered in glucose and ordered in the frozen state. The sensitivity of the difference Fourier technique to small changes in structure provides an ideal method for testing this hypothesis.

3-D reconstruction of molecular shape from microcrystal thin sections

1983 ◽  
Vol 41 ◽  
pp. 748-749
Author(s):  
S. Cusack ◽  
J.-C. Jésior
Keyword(s):  
Three Dimensional ◽  
Molecular Shape ◽  
Biological Molecules ◽  
Fourier Space ◽  
Single Particles ◽  
Thin Sections ◽  
Standard Methods ◽  
X Ray ◽  
X Ray Crystallography ◽  
Dimensional Reconstruction

Three-dimensional reconstruction techniques using electron microscopy have been principally developed for application to 2-D arrays (i.e. monolayers) of biological molecules and symmetrical single particles (e.g. helical viruses). However many biological molecules that crystallise form multilayered microcrystals which are unsuitable for study by either the standard methods of 3-D reconstruction or, because of their size, by X-ray crystallography. The grid sectioning technique enables a number of different projections of such microcrystals to be obtained in well defined directions (e.g. parallel to crystal axes) and poses the problem of how best these projections can be used to reconstruct the packing and shape of the molecules forming the microcrystal.Given sufficient projections there may be enough information to do a crystallographic reconstruction in Fourier space. We however have considered the situation where only a limited number of projections are available, as for example in the case of catalase platelets where three orthogonal and two diagonal projections have been obtained (Fig. 1).

Electron microscopy of rabbit FC crystals

1983 ◽  
Vol 41 ◽  
pp. 730-731
Author(s):  
Robert A. Grant ◽  
Laura L. Degn ◽  
Wah Chiu ◽  
John Robinson
Keyword(s):  
Electron Microscopy ◽  
High Resolution ◽  
High Resolution Electron Microscopy ◽  
Molecular Replacement ◽  
X Ray ◽  
X Ray Crystallography ◽  
Resolution Electron ◽  
Replacement Technique ◽  
Hydrated Crystal ◽  
Molecular Structure Analysis

Proteolytic digestion of the immunoglobulin IgG with papain cleaves the molecule into an antigen binding fragment, Fab, and a compliment binding fragment, Fc. Structures of intact immunoglobulin, Fab and Fc from various sources have been solved by X-ray crystallography. Rabbit Fc can be crystallized as thin platelets suitable for high resolution electron microscopy. The structure of rabbit Fc can be expected to be similar to the known structure of human Fc, making it an ideal specimen for comparing the X-ray and electron crystallographic techniques and for the application of the molecular replacement technique to electron crystallography. Thin protein crystals embedded in ice diffract to high resolution. A low resolution image of a frozen, hydrated crystal can be expected to have a better contrast than a glucose embedded crystal due to the larger density difference between protein and ice compared to protein and glucose. For these reasons we are using an ice embedding technique to prepare the rabbit Fc crystals for molecular structure analysis by electron microscopy.

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