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Comprehensive macromolecular conformations mapped by quantitative SAXS analyses

Nature Methods volume 10, pages 453–454 (2013)Cite this article

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Biological macromolecular functions require distinct conformational states that are challenging to examine comprehensively. Current methods to quantify conformational similarities and distinguish different assembly states are underdeveloped. Recent developments in small-angle X-ray scattering (SAXS) have shown that SAXS can provide the resolution to resolve conformational states, characterize flexible macromolecules and screen in high throughput under most solution conditions1. However, robust tools for comprehensively characterizing and visualizing the different conformational states identified by SAXS have been lacking. Here we present the SAXS structural comparison map (SCM) and volatility of ratio (VR) difference metric, which together provide quantitative and superposition-independent evaluation of solution-state conformations.

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Figure 1: SAXS applied to measure structural similarity.

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Acknowledgements

This work was supported by the Department of Energy (DOE) program Integrated Diffraction Analysis Technologies, US National Institutes of Health (NIH) grant GM105404 and Berkeley Laboratory Directed Research and Development funds provided by the Director, Office of Science, DOE. Support for the MutSβ and DNA-repair studies came from NIH GM066359 (C.T.M.), NS060115 (C.T.M.) and CA092584 (C.T.M. and J.A.T.).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Physical Biosciences Division, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Berkeley, California, USA

    Greg L Hura, Kevin N Dyer, Robert P Rambo & Michal Hammel

  2. Life Sciences Division, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Berkeley, California, USA

    Helen Budworth, Cynthia T McMurray & John A Tainer

  3. Department of Integrative Structural and Computational Biology, The Skaggs Institute of Chemical Biology, The Scripps Research Institute, La Jolla, California, USA

    John A Tainer

Authors
  1. Greg L Hura
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  2. Helen Budworth
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  3. Kevin N Dyer
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  4. Robert P Rambo
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  5. Michal Hammel
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  6. Cynthia T McMurray
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  7. John A Tainer
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Correspondence to Cynthia T McMurray or John A Tainer.

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Supplementary Tables 1 and 2, Supplementary Note and Supplementary Methods (PDF 5315 kb)

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Hura, G., Budworth, H., Dyer, K. et al. Comprehensive macromolecular conformations mapped by quantitative SAXS analyses. Nat Methods 10, 453–454 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1038/nmeth.2453

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