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-Structure paper
Title | Direct Visualization of a 26 kDa Protein by Cryo-Electron Microscopy Aided by a Small Scaffold Protein. |
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Journal, issue, pages | Biochemistry, Vol. 60, Issue 14, Page 1075-1079, Year 2021 |
Publish date | Apr 13, 2021 |
Authors | Yi-Hsiang Chiu / Kuang-Ting Ko / Tzu-Jing Yang / Kuen-Phon Wu / Meng-Ru Ho / Piotr Draczkowski / Shang-Te Danny Hsu / |
PubMed Abstract | Cryo-electron microscopy (cryo-EM)-based structure determination of small proteins is hindered by the technical challenges associated with low signal-to-noise ratios of their particle images in ...Cryo-electron microscopy (cryo-EM)-based structure determination of small proteins is hindered by the technical challenges associated with low signal-to-noise ratios of their particle images in intrinsically noisy micrographs. One solution is to attach the target protein to a large protein scaffold to increase its apparent size and, therefore, image contrast. Here we report a novel scaffold design based on a trimeric helical protein, ornithine transcarbamylase (OTC), fused to human ubiquitin. As a proof of principle, we demonstrated the ability to resolve a cryo-EM map of a 26 kDa human ubiquitin C-terminal hydrolase (UCHL1) attached to the C-terminus of ubiquitin as part of the trimeric assembly. The results revealed conformational changes in UCHL1 upon binding to ubiquitin, namely, a significant displacement of α-helix 2, which was also observed by X-ray crystallography. Our findings demonstrated the potential of the trimeric OTC scaffold design for studying a large number of ubiquitin interacting proteins by cryo-EM. |
External links | Biochemistry / PubMed:33719392 |
Methods | EM (single particle) |
Resolution | 4.1 Å |
Structure data | EMDB-30634: |
Source |
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