Structural Dynamics (Jul 2017)

Structural enzymology using X-ray free electron lasers

  • Christopher Kupitz,
  • Jose L. Olmos Jr.,
  • Mark Holl,
  • Lee Tremblay,
  • Kanupriya Pande,
  • Suraj Pandey,
  • Dominik Oberthür,
  • Mark Hunter,
  • Mengning Liang,
  • Andrew Aquila,
  • Jason Tenboer,
  • George Calvey,
  • Andrea Katz,
  • Yujie Chen,
  • Max O. Wiedorn,
  • Juraj Knoska,
  • Alke Meents,
  • Valerio Majriani,
  • Tyler Norwood,
  • Ishwor Poudyal,
  • Thomas Grant,
  • Mitchell D. Miller,
  • Weijun Xu,
  • Aleksandra Tolstikova,
  • Andrew Morgan,
  • Markus Metz,
  • Jose M. Martin-Garcia,
  • James D. Zook,
  • Shatabdi Roy-Chowdhury,
  • Jesse Coe,
  • Nirupa Nagaratnam,
  • Domingo Meza,
  • Raimund Fromme,
  • Shibom Basu,
  • Matthias Frank,
  • Thomas White,
  • Anton Barty,
  • Sasa Bajt,
  • Oleksandr Yefanov,
  • Henry N. Chapman,
  • Nadia Zatsepin,
  • Garrett Nelson,
  • Uwe Weierstall,
  • John Spence,
  • Peter Schwander,
  • Lois Pollack,
  • Petra Fromme,
  • Abbas Ourmazd,
  • George N. Phillips Jr.,
  • Marius Schmidt

DOI
https://doi.org/10.1063/1.4972069
Journal volume & issue
Vol. 4, no. 4
pp. 044003 – 044003-7

Abstract

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Mix-and-inject serial crystallography (MISC) is a technique designed to image enzyme catalyzed reactions in which small protein crystals are mixed with a substrate just prior to being probed by an X-ray pulse. This approach offers several advantages over flow cell studies. It provides (i) room temperature structures at near atomic resolution, (ii) time resolution ranging from microseconds to seconds, and (iii) convenient reaction initiation. It outruns radiation damage by using femtosecond X-ray pulses allowing damage and chemistry to be separated. Here, we demonstrate that MISC is feasible at an X-ray free electron laser by studying the reaction of M. tuberculosis ß-lactamase microcrystals with ceftriaxone antibiotic solution. Electron density maps of the apo-ß-lactamase and of the ceftriaxone bound form were obtained at 2.8 Å and 2.4 Å resolution, respectively. These results pave the way to study cyclic and non-cyclic reactions and represent a new field of time-resolved structural dynamics for numerous substrate-triggered biological reactions.