Publications
Acta crystallographica. Section D, Structural biologyApr 2024 DOI:
10.1107/S205979832400072X

AlphaFold-assisted structure determination of a bacterial protein of unknown function using X-ray and electron crystallography

Miller, Justin E; Agdanowski, Matthew P; Dolinsky, Joshua L; Sawaya, Michael R; Cascio, Duilio; Rodriguez, Jose A; Yeates, Todd O
Product Used
Genes
Abstract
Macromolecular crystallography generally requires the recovery of missing phase information from diffraction data to reconstruct an electron-density map of the crystallized molecule. Most recent structures have been solved using molecular replacement as a phasing method, requiring an a priori structure that is closely related to the target protein to serve as a search model; when no such search model exists, molecular replacement is not possible. New advances in computational machine-learning methods, however, have resulted in major advances in protein structure predictions from sequence information. Methods that generate predicted structural models of sufficient accuracy provide a powerful approach to molecular replacement. Taking advantage of these advances, AlphaFold predictions were applied to enable structure determination of a bacterial protein of unknown function (UniProtKB Q63NT7, NCBI locus BPSS0212) based on diffraction data that had evaded phasing attempts using MIR and anomalous scattering methods. Using both X-ray and micro-electron (microED) diffraction data, it was possible to solve the structure of the main fragment of the protein using a predicted model of that domain as a starting point. The use of predicted structural models importantly expands the promise of electron diffraction, where structure determination relies critically on molecular replacement.
Product Used
Genes

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