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  • Exploring Carbon Nanomaterial Diversity for Nucleation of Protein Crystals.

Exploring Carbon Nanomaterial Diversity for Nucleation of Protein Crystals.

Scientific reports (2016-02-05)
Lata Govada, Hannah S Leese, Emmanuel Saridakis, Sean Kassen, Benny Chain, Sahir Khurshid, Robert Menzel, Sheng Hu, Milo S P Shaffer, Naomi E Chayen
ABSTRACT

Controlling crystal nucleation is a crucial step in obtaining high quality protein crystals for structure determination by X-ray crystallography. Carbon nanomaterials (CNMs) including carbon nanotubes, graphene oxide, and carbon black provide a range of surface topographies, porosities and length scales; functionalisation with two different approaches, gas phase radical grafting and liquid phase reductive grafting, provide routes to a range of oligomer functionalised products. These grafted materials, combined with a range of controls, were used in a large-scale assessment of the effectiveness for protein crystal nucleation of 20 different carbon nanomaterials on five proteins. This study has allowed a direct comparison of the key characteristics of carbon-based nucleants: appropriate surface chemistry, porosity and/or roughness are required. The most effective solid system tested in this study, carbon black nanoparticles functionalised with poly(ethylene glycol) methyl ether of mean molecular weight 5000, provides a novel highly effective nucleant, that was able to induce crystal nucleation of four out of the five proteins tested at metastable conditions.

MATERIALS
Product Number
Brand
Product Description

Sigma-Aldrich
N,N-Dimethylacrylamide, 99%, contains 500 ppm monomethyl ether hydroquinone as inhibitor
Sigma-Aldrich
2-(Dimethylamino)ethyl methacrylate, contains 700-1000 ppm monomethyl ether hydroquinone as inhibitor, 98%
Sigma-Aldrich
4-Vinylpyridine, contains 100 ppm hydroquinone as inhibitor, 95%
Sigma-Aldrich
Poly(ethylene glycol), BioUltra, 3,350
Sigma-Aldrich
Sodium, 99.95% trace metals basis, ingot
Sigma-Aldrich
Poly(ethylene glycol), BioUltra, 2,000