Full text

Turn on search term navigation

© 2008 Mathew-Fenn et al. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (the “License”), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. Notwithstanding the ProQuest Terms and Conditions, you may use this content in accordance with the terms of the License.

Abstract

We report a novel molecular ruler for measurement of distances and distance distributions with accurate external calibration. Using solution X-ray scattering we determine the scattering interference between two gold nanocrystal probes attached site-specifically to a macromolecule of interest. Fourier transformation of the interference pattern provides a model-independent probability distribution for the distances between the probe centers-of-mass. To test the approach, we measure end-to-end distances for a variety of DNA structures. We demonstrate that measurements with independently prepared samples and using different X-ray sources are highly reproducible, we demonstrate the quantitative accuracy of the first and second moments of the distance distributions, and we demonstrate that the technique recovers complex distribution shapes. Distances measured with the solution scattering-interference ruler match the corresponding crystallographic values, but differ from distances measured previously with alternate ruler techniques. The X-ray scattering interference ruler should be a powerful tool for relating crystal structures to solution structures and for studying molecular fluctuations.

Details

Title
A Molecular Ruler for Measuring Quantitative Distance Distributions
Author
Mathew-Fenn, Rebecca S; Das, Rhiju; Silverman, Joshua A; Walker, Peter A; Harbury, Pehr A B
First page
e3229
Section
Research Article
Publication year
2008
Publication date
Oct 2008
Publisher
Public Library of Science
e-ISSN
19326203
Source type
Scholarly Journal
Language of publication
English
ProQuest document ID
1312316456
Copyright
© 2008 Mathew-Fenn et al. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (the “License”), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. Notwithstanding the ProQuest Terms and Conditions, you may use this content in accordance with the terms of the License.