Dresden 2011 – scientific programme

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BP: Fachverband Biologische Physik

BP 2: Protein Structure \& Dynamics

BP 2.1: Invited Talk

Monday, March 14, 2011, 10:15–10:45, ZEU 260

Protein Structure and Dynamics from Low-Resolution Data — •Gunnar F. Schröder — Forschungszentrum Jülich

Structure determination of large proteins and protein assemblies is a major challenge in molecular biology. Experiments, such as X-ray crystallography or single particle Cryo-EM, on such complex systems often yield only low resolution (> 4Å) data, which are not sufficient to fully determine atomistic structures. The refinement of approximate initial models is typically significantly harder than at high resolution. We present an approach that makes use of additional prior information on homologous structures which guides the refinement and dramatically improves the obtained structures.

Single-particle Cryo-EM yields images of individual proteins in potentially different conformations and therefore yields a wealth of information on structural dynamics. This information is however very difficult to extract since each image is extremely noisy. The common approaches to reconstruct three-dimensional density maps average out any structural heterogeneity and the information on the dynamics is lost. We show how principal protein motions can be reconstructed from the variation contained in the single particle images.