Abstract (eng)
The elucidation of high resolution macromolecular structures depends largely on the application of brilliant X-ray radiation to biological matter in crystalline form, which is the basis of macromolecular crystallography. When X-rays interact with organic matter a plethora of electrons is ejected from atomic shells leading to ionizations, formation of radicals and breakage of bonds. In summary, this leads to accumulating damage of protein molecules and as a consequence to progressing deterioration of the crystal lattice.
The rate of damage is reduced dramatically when experiments are done at 100K in a nitrogen stream, which has become a standard technique and kept the problem under control for many years. Today, however, in strong undulator beamlines at third generation synchrotrons radiation damage is re-emerging as a major limiting factor to the amount of information that can be obtained from one crystal.
The use of electron or radical scavengers to reduce the load of reactive species and thereby protect biological macromolecules has been described for electron spectroscopy and in analogy promising experiments have been conducted in macromolecular X-ray crystallography.
Apart from the well-described global and structural damage, enzymes containing metal co-factors run an additional risk. It has been shown that reduction of the metal is one of the first events happening. While the redox state can not be determined from the electron density measured experimentally, it can have critical impact on the metal's structural environment.
In the present work the influence of a range of possible electron scavengers on the damage suffered by crystals of model metalloproteins was investigated. For that purpose, proteins were crystallized and soaked in scavenger solutions. Data was collected from azurin, insulin and myoglobin at three different stations: the ESRF (European Synchrotron Radiation Facility, Grenoble), at BESSY (Berliner Elektronenspeicherring-Gesellschaft für Synchrotronstrahlung) and at the rotating anode home source present at the institute. After processing the data in five consecutive subsets of increasing dose, local and global effects of radiation damage were evaluated. A special focus was given to the metal oxidation state, which was determined by UV-vis microspectrophotometry experiments.
Our results suggest that scavengers are not able to prevent the reduction of the metal. Nonetheless, DNQ, hepes and the previously reported scavenger ascorbate, might have a small protective effect and would be candidates for further tests.