Disordered nano-wrinkle substrates for inducing crystallization over a wide range of concentration of protein and precipitant

摘要

There are large number of proteins, the existence of which are known but nottheir crystal structure, because of difficulty in finding the exact conditionfor their crystallization. Heterogeneous nucleation on disordered poroussubstrates with small yet large distribution of pores is considered a panaceafor this problem, but a universal nucleant, suitable for crystallizing largevariety of proteins does not really exist. To this end, we report here anano-wrinkled substrate which displays remarkable ability and control overprotein crystallization. Experiments with different proteins show that on thesesubstrates, crystals nucleate even at very low protein concentration in buffer.Small number of very large crystals appear for precipitant concentrationsvaried over orders of magnitude ~0.003-0.3M; for some proteins, crystals appeareven without addition of any precipitant, not seen with any other heterogeneoussubstrates. In essence, these substrates significantly diminish the influenceof the above two parameters, thought to be key factor for crystallization,signifying that this advantage can be exploited for finding out crystallizationcondition for other yet-to-be-crystallized proteins.