The room temperature crystal structure of a bacterial phytochrome determined by serial femtosecond crystallography

Petra Edlund, Heikki Takala, Elin Claesson, Leócadie Henry, Robert Dods, Heli Lehtivuori, Matthijs Panman, Kanupriya Pande, Thomas White, Takanori Nakane, Oskar Berntsson, Emil Gustavsson, Petra Båth, Vaibhav Modi, Shatabdi Roy-Chowdhury, James Zook, Peter Berntsen, Suraj Pandey, Ishwor Poudyal, Jason TenboerChristopher Kupitz, Anton Barty, Petra Fromme, Jake D. Koralek, Tomoyuki Tanaka, John Spence, Mengning Liang, Mark S. Hunter, Sebastien Boutet, Eriko Nango, Keith Moffat, Gerrit Groenhof, Janne Ihalainen, Emina A. Stojkovi, Marius Schmidt, Sebastian Westenhoff*

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to JournalArticleAcademicpeer-review

Abstract

Phytochromes are a family of photoreceptors that control light responses of plants, fungi and bacteria. A sequence of structural changes, which is not yet fully understood, leads to activation of an output domain. Time-resolved serial femtosecond crystallography (SFX) can potentially shine light on these conformational changes. Here we report the room temperature crystal structure of the chromophore-binding domains of the Deinococcus radiodurans phytochrome at 2.1 Å resolution. The structure was obtained by serial femtosecond X-ray crystallography from microcrystals at an X-ray free electron laser. We find overall good agreement compared to a crystal structure at 1.35 Å resolution derived from conventional crystallography at cryogenic temperatures, which we also report here. The thioether linkage between chromophore and protein is subject to positional ambiguity at the synchrotron, but is fully resolved with SFX. The study paves the way for time-resolved structural investigations of the phytochrome photocycle with time-resolved SFX.

Original languageEnglish
Article number35279
JournalScientific Reports
Volume6
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 19 Oct 2016

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