Fragment-based determination of a proteinase K structure from MicroED data using ARCIMBOLDO_SHREDDER

Structure determination of novel biological macromolecules by X-ray crystallo­graphy can be facilitated by the use of small structural fragments, some of only a few residues in length, as effective search models for molecular replacement to overcome the phase problem. Independence from the need for a complete pre-existing model with sequence similarity to the crystallized molecule is the primary appeal of ARCIMBOLDO, a suite of programs which employs this ab initio algorithm for phase determination. Here, the use of ARCIMBOLDO is investigated to overcome the phase problem with the electron cryomicroscopy (cryoEM) method known as microcrystal electron diffraction (MicroED). The results support the use of the ARCIMBOLDO_SHREDDER pipeline to provide phasing solutions for a structure of proteinase K from 1.6 Å resolution data using model fragments derived from the structures of proteins sharing a sequence identity of as low as 20%. ARCIMBOLDO_SHREDDER identified the most accurate polyalanine fragments from a set of distantly related sequence homologues. Alternatively, such templates were extracted in spherical volumes and given internal degrees of freedom to refine towards the target structure. Both modes relied on the rotation function in Phaser to identify or refine fragment models and its translation function to place them. Model completion from the placed fragments proceeded through phase combination of partial solutions and/or density modification and main-chain autotracing using SHELXE. The combined set of fragments was sufficient to arrive at a solution that resembled that determined by conventional molecular replacement using the known target structure as a search model. This approach obviates the need for a single, complete and highly accurate search model when phasing MicroED data, and permits the evaluation of large fragment libraries for this purpose.
This work was performed as part of STROBE, an NSF Science and Technology Center, through grant DMR-1548924. This work was also supported by DOE grant DE-FC02-02ER63421 and NIH–NIGMS grants R35 GM128867 and P41GM136508. LSR is supported by USPHS National Research Service Award 5T32GM008496. RJB received a fellowship from FAPESP (16/24191-8 and 17/13485-3). CM is grateful to MICINN for her BES-2015-71397 scholarship associated with the Structural Biology Maria de Maeztu Unit of Excellence. This work was supported by grants BIO2015-64216-P, PGC2018-101370-B-100 and MDM2014-0435-01 (the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness) and Generalitat de Catalunya (2017SGR-1192). JAR is supported as a Searle Scholar, a Pew Scholar and a Beckman Young Investigator. The Gonen laboratory is supported by the Howard Hughes Medical Institute; this work was also partially supported by the Janelia Research Campus Visitor Exchange Program.