Self-assembled superstructure alleviates air-water interface effect in cryo-EM

Liming Zheng, Jie Xu, Weihua Wang, Xiaoyin Gao, Chao Zhao (), Weijun Guo, Luzhao Sun, Hang Cheng, Fanhao Meng, Buhang Chen, Weiyu Sun, Xia Jia, Xiong Zhou, Kai Wu, Zhongfan Liu, Feng Ding, Nan Liu (), Hong-Wei Wang () and Hailin Peng ()
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Liming Zheng: Peking University
Jie Xu: Tsinghua University
Weihua Wang: China Academy of Aerospace Science and Innovation
Xiaoyin Gao: Peking University
Chao Zhao: Shenzhen University of Advanced Technology
Weijun Guo: Peking University
Luzhao Sun: Beijing Graphene Institute (BGI)
Hang Cheng: Shuimu BioSciences Ltd
Fanhao Meng: Shuimu BioSciences Ltd
Buhang Chen: Beijing Graphene Institute (BGI)
Weiyu Sun: Peking University
Xia Jia: Tsinghua University
Xiong Zhou: Peking University
Kai Wu: Peking University
Zhongfan Liu: Peking University
Feng Ding: Shenzhen University of Advanced Technology
Nan Liu: Tsinghua University
Hong-Wei Wang: Tsinghua University
Hailin Peng: Peking University

Nature Communications, 2024, vol. 15, issue 1, 1-10

Abstract: Abstract Cryo-electron microscopy (cryo-EM) has been widely used to reveal the structures of proteins at atomic resolution. One key challenge is that almost all proteins are predominantly adsorbed to the air-water interface during standard cryo-EM specimen preparation. The interaction of proteins with air-water interface will significantly impede the success of reconstruction and achievable resolution. Here, we highlight the critical role of impenetrable surfactant monolayers in passivating the air-water interface problems, and develop a robust effective method for high-resolution cryo-EM analysis, by using the superstructure GSAMs which comprises surfactant self-assembled monolayers (SAMs) and graphene membrane. The GSAMs works well in enriching the orientations and improving particle utilization ratio of multiple proteins, facilitating the 3.3-Å resolution reconstruction of a 100-kDa protein complex (ACE2-RBD), which shows strong preferential orientation using traditional specimen preparation protocol. Additionally, we demonstrate that GSAMs enables the successful determinations of small proteins (

Date: 2024
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DOI: 10.1038/s41467-024-51696-w

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