# A New Route for the Determination of Protein Structure in Physiological Environment

## TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel methodology utilizing a 2D protein array on a functionalized surface with a graphene cover, aiming to determine protein structures in physiological environments without crystallization or radiation damage.

## Contribution

It proposes a new multidisciplinary approach to overcome limitations of existing techniques by creating oriented protein arrays under physiological conditions.

## Key findings

- Potential to determine protein structures without crystallization
- Method preserves proteins in physiological conditions
- Addresses radiation damage issues in structure determination

## Abstract

Revealing the structure of complex biological macromolecules, such as proteins, is an essential step for understanding the chemical mechanisms that determine the diversity of their functions. Synchrotron based x-ray crystallography and cryo-electron microscopy have made major contributions in determining thousands of protein structures even from micro-sized crystals. They suffer from some limitations that have not been overcome, such as radiation damage, the natural inability to crystallize of a number of proteins and experimental conditions for structure determination that are incompatible with the physiological environment. Today the ultrashort and ultra-bright pulses of X-ray free-electron lasers (XFELs) have made attainable the dream to determine protein structure before radiation damage starts to destroy the samples. However, the signal-to-noise ratio remains a great challenge to obtain usable diffraction patterns from a single protein molecule. We describe here a new methodology that should overcome the signal and protein crystallization limits. Using a multidisciplinary approach, we propose to create a two dimensional protein array with defined orientation attached on a self-assembled-monolayer. We develop a literature-based, flexible toolbox capable of assembling different proteins on a functionalized surface while keeping them under physiological conditions during the experiment, using a water-confining graphene cover.

---
Source: https://tomesphere.com/paper/1702.05998