快速与慢速冷却:表征冷冻电镜玻璃化效应及平衡系综恢复
Cooling fast and slow: Characterizing the effects of vitrification in cryo-EM and the subsequent recovery of equilibrium populations
摘要
该研究用超过50 ms的分子动力学模拟,考察Trp-cage小蛋白在平衡态与七种速率快速冷却下的行为,冷却速率跨越三个数量级,最慢者接近实验速率。研究发现水的玻璃化不受蛋白影响;基于277 K平衡采样构建的马尔可夫状态模型显示,特征时间长于非平衡冷却时长的状态更不易受冷却伪影影响。尽管230 K平衡系综中部分状态消失,冷却系综中未见消失。作者据此提出从玻璃化系综恢复平衡布居的热力学推断框架,认为冷冻电镜可准确研究生物分子系综。
原文摘要
Single-particle cryogenic electron microscopy (cryo-EM), a powerful class of techniques in structural biology with the potential to resolve molecular ensembles, requires that samples be vitrified to protect them from the high vacuum of the electron microscope. However, the effects of vitrification on biomolecular ensembles are unknown. To study them, we carried out extensive molecular dynamics simulations (over 50 ms) of the Trp-cage miniprotein at equilibrium and undergoing rapid cooling. We simulated seven cooling rates spanning three orders of magnitude, with the slowest coolings matching experimental rates. By inspecting molecular mobility and density-temperature trajectories for water with and without protein, we found that water vitrification is unaltered by the protein. To track protein conformation changes, and to relate them to kinetics, we made a Markov State Model (MSM) of Trp-cage from 5.4 ms of equilibrium sampling at 277 K. We observed that MSM states with a characteristic time longer than the duration of the nonequilibrium cooling tend to be more robust to artifacts induced by such cooling. Critically, although we observe that some states vanish in the equilibrium ensemble at 230 K, none do in our nonequilibrium cooled ensembles. To account for these perturbations, we developed a thermodynamic inference framework for recovering equilibrium populations from vitrified ensembles. These results indicate that cryo-EM has the capacity to be an accurate technique for the study of biomolecular ensembles.
推荐理由:方法学上对冷冻电镜玻璃化伪影与平衡系综恢复有重要价值,模拟严谨;但与生殖医学/胚胎实验室核心问题距离较远,仅适合对冷冻保存物理机制感兴趣者浏览。
文献解读
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