TY  - JOUR
AU  - Borshchevskiy, V.
AU  - Efremov, R.
AU  - Moiseeva, E.
AU  - Büldt, G.
AU  - Gordeliy, V. I.
TI  - Overcoming merohedral twinning in crystals of bacteriorhodopsin grown in lipidic mesophase
JO  - Acta crystallographica / D
VL  - 66
SN  - 0907-4449
CY  - Copenhagen
PB  - Munksgaard
M1  - PreJuSER-12877
SP  - 26 - 32
PY  - 2010
N1  - The work was supported by the program 'Chaires d'excellence' edition 2008 of ANR France, the CEA(IBS)-HGF(FZJ) STC 5.1 specific agreement and the MC grant for training and career development of researchers (Marie Curie, FP7-PEOPLE-2007-1-1-ITN, project SBMPs). This work was performed in the framework of Russian State Contracts Nos. 02.740.11.0299 (on the subject 'Cell biology and physical properties of membrane proteins' according to claim 'Scientific research by members of Research and Education Center in the field of physico-chemical molecular and cell biology', code 2009-1.1-142-064) and 02.740.11.5010 (on the subject 'Investigation of molecular mechanisms of the first step of energy transformation in the cell' according to claim 'Scientific research by groups under the guidance of invited scientists in the field of biology, agricultural science and living system technologies', code 2009-1.5-501-002) and a contract P974 on the subject of 'Ultrasensitive biosensors on the basis of nanomaterials' in the framework of activity 1.2.2 'Scientific research by scientific groups under the guidance of Candidates of Science' of the Federal Target Program 'Scientific and academic research cadres of innovative Russia' for 2009-2013. The authors would like to thank Christian Baeken, Maria Silacheva, Dmitry Bratanov, Yulia Borshchevskaya, Anton Abyzov, Alexandr Shava, Elizaveta Denisenko, Ivan Erofeev and Ivan Gushchin for their help with protein production and crystallization. Eva Pebay-Peyroula and Alexandr Popov are greatly acknowledged for their valuable comments on the manuscript.
AB  - Twinning is one of the most common crystal-growth defects in protein crystallography. There are neither efficient rational approaches for the growth of nontwinned protein crystals nor are there examples of systematic studies of the dependence of the twinning-ratio distribution on crystallization conditions. The description of the twinning phenomenon has been covered even less for membrane-protein crystals and is non-existent for crystals grown using lipidic phases (in meso). In the present work, possibilities for overcoming merohedral twinning are investigated for crystals of the membrane protein bacteriorhodopsin (bR) grown in meso. It is shown that traditional crystallization additives are not effective in the case of the in meso crystallization of bR. The twinning ratio was determined for 310 crystals grown under different crystallization conditions. A correlation of the twinning ratio with the growth rate of the crystals was observed. Slow growth indicated that crystals had a noticeable chance of avoiding twinning. Model calculations were performed in order to rationalize this observation. The calculations confirmed the experimental observation that most crystals consist of two twin domains and showed that under this condition small changes in the probability of twin-domain formation lead to dramatic changes in the number of nontwinned crystals, which explains why slow crystal growth results in a considerable number of nontwinned crystals.
KW  - Bacteriorhodopsins: chemistry
KW  - Bacteriorhodopsins: isolation & purification
KW  - Bacteriorhodopsins: metabolism
KW  - Crystallization
KW  - Crystallography, X-Ray
KW  - Halobacterium salinarum
KW  - Lipids: chemistry
KW  - Protein Conformation
KW  - Protein Structure, Tertiary
KW  - Purple Membrane: metabolism
KW  - Lipids (NLM Chemicals)
KW  - Bacteriorhodopsins (NLM Chemicals)
KW  - J (WoSType)
LB  - PUB:(DE-HGF)16
C6  - pmid:20057046
UR  - <Go to ISI:>//WOS:000273758800005
DO  - DOI:10.1107/S0907444909042838
UR  - https://juser.fz-juelich.de/record/12877
ER  -