Nuclear magnetic resonance - from molecules to man

Initial observations of the physical phenomenon of nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) date back to the late 1940s. In the following two decades high-resolution NMR in solution became an indispensible analytical tool in chemistry, and solid state NMR had an increasingly important role in physics. Some of the potentialities of the method for investigations of complex biological systems had also long been anticipated, and initial experiments with biological specimens were described already 30 years ago. In practice, however, biological applications of NMR have become really attractive only during the last decade, following revolutionary advances in NMR instrumentation and the methodology for their use. NMR projects in biology and medicine now include studies of biomacromolecular structure and function, work on biological membranes, in vivo studies of biochemical processes, and imaging of macroscopic objects. Because of imminent practical applications in medical diagnosis and thanks to extensive coverage by the popular news media, interest in some of the recent developments spreads far beyond the scientific community, making NMR a widely popular fiel

High-yield Escherichia coli -based cell-free expression of human proteins

Production of sufficient amounts of human proteins is a frequent bottleneck in structural biology. Here we describe an Escherichia coli-based cell-free system which yields mg-quantities of human proteins in N-terminal fusion constructs with the GB1 domain, which show significantly increased translation efficiency. A newly generated E. coli BL21 (DE3) RIPL-Star strain was used, which contains a variant RNase E with reduced activity and an excess of rare-codon tRNAs, and is devoid of lon and ompT protease activity. In the implementation of the expression system we used freshly in-house prepared cell extract. Batch-mode cell-free expression with this setup was up to twofold more economical than continuous-exchange expression, with yields of 0.2-0.9mg of purified protein per mL of reaction mixture. Native folding of the proteins thus obtained is documented with 2D [15N,1H]-HSQC NM

Amino acid sequence, haem-iron co-ordination geometry and functional properties of mitochondrial and bacterial c-type cytochromes

Cytochromes are found in all biological oxidation Systems which involve transport of reducing equivalents through organized chains of membrane bound intermediates, regardless of the ultimate oxidant (Keilin, 1966; Bartsch, 1978; Meyer & Kamen, 1982). Thus, cytochromes are present not only in the aerobic mitochondrial and bac-terial respiratory chain, but are also found in much more diversified procariotic Systems, including all varieties of facultative anaerobes (nitrate and nitrite reducers), obligate anaerobes (sulphate reducers and phototrophic sulphur bacteria), facultative photoheterotrophes (phototrophic non-sulphur purple bacteria), and the photoautotrophic cyanobacteria (blue-green algae). Among the different types of cytochromes occurring in the cell, the soluble c-type cytochromes (‘class I', Meyer & Kamen, 1982) are the most abundant and best characterized group of proteins (Bartsch, 1978; Meyer & Kamen, 1982; Dickerson & Timkovitch, 1975; Lemberg & Barrett, 1973; Salemme, 1977; Ferguson-Miller, Brautigan & Margoliash, 1979). The amino acid sequences of more than 80 mitochrondrial and close to 40 bacterial cytochromes c are known (Meyer & Kamen, 1982; Dickerson & Timkovitch, 1975; Schwartz & Dayhoff, 1976; Dayhoff & Barker, 1978