Metallo-supramolecular branched polymer protects particles from air-water interface in single-particle cryo-electron microscopy
- Resource Type
- article
- Authors
- Yixin Xu; Yuqi Qin; Lang Wang; Yingyi Zhang; Yufeng Wang; Shangyu Dang
- Source
- Communications Biology, Vol 7, Iss 1, Pp 1-10 (2024)
- Subject
- Biology (General)
QH301-705.5
- Language
- English
- ISSN
- 2399-3642
Abstract Recent technological breakthroughs in single-particle cryo-electron microscopy (cryo-EM) enable rapid atomic structure determination of biological macromolecules. A major bottleneck in the current single particle cryo-EM pipeline is the preparation of good quality frozen cryo-EM grids, which is mostly a trial-and-error process. Among many issues, preferred particle orientation and sample damage by air–water interface (AWI) are common practical problems. Here we report a method of applying metallo-supramolecular branched polymer (MSBP) in the cryo-sample preparation for high-resolution single-particle cryo-EM. Our data shows that MSBP keeps a majority of particles away from air–water interface and mitigates preferred orientation as verified by the analyses of apoferritin, hemagglutinin) trimer and various sample proteins. The use of MSBP is a simple method to improve particle distribution for high-resolution structure determination in single-particle cryo-EM.