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Publication Abstract from PubMed

Cryo-electron microscopy (cryo-EM) has been widely used to reveal the structures of proteins at atomic resolution. One key challenge is that almost all proteins are predominantly adsorbed to the air-water interface during standard cryo-EM specimen preparation. The interaction of proteins with air-water interface will significantly impede the success of reconstruction and achievable resolution. Here, we highlight the critical role of impenetrable surfactant monolayers in passivating the air-water interface problems, and develop a robust effective method for high-resolution cryo-EM analysis, by using the superstructure GSAMs which comprises surfactant self-assembled monolayers (SAMs) and graphene membrane. The GSAMs works well in enriching the orientations and improving particle utilization ratio of multiple proteins, facilitating the 3.3-A resolution reconstruction of a 100-kDa protein complex (ACE2-RBD), which shows strong preferential orientation using traditional specimen preparation protocol. Additionally, we demonstrate that GSAMs enables the successful determinations of small proteins (<100 kDa) at near-atomic resolution. This study expands the understanding of SAMs and provides a key to better control the interaction of protein with air-water interface.

Self-assembled superstructure alleviates air-water interface effect in cryo-EM.,Zheng L, Xu J, Wang W, Gao X, Zhao C, Guo W, Sun L, Cheng H, Meng F, Chen B, Sun W, Jia X, Zhou X, Wu K, Liu Z, Ding F, Liu N, Wang HW, Peng H Nat Commun. 2024 Aug 24;15(1):7300. doi: 10.1038/s41467-024-51696-w. PMID:39181869^[4]

From MEDLINE®/PubMed®, a database of the U.S. National Library of Medicine.