X-ray Absorption Spectroscopy and Coherent X-ray Diffraction Imaging for Time-Resolved Investigation of the Biological Complexes: Computer Modelling towards the XFEL Experiment

Abstract

The development of the next generation synchrotron radiation sources - free electron lasers - is approaching to become an effective tool for the time-resolved experiments aimed to solve actual problems in various fields such as chemistry' biology' medicine' etc. In order to demonstrate' how these experiments may be performed for the real systems to obtain information at the atomic and macromolecular levels' we have performed a molecular dynamics computer simulation combined with quantum chemistry calculations for the human phosphoglycerate kinase enzyme with Mg containing substrate. The simulated structures were used to calculate coherent X-ray diffraction patterns' reflecting the conformational state of the enzyme, and Mg K-edge X-ray absorption spectra, which depend on the local structure of the substrate. These two techniques give complementary information making such an approach highly effective for time-resolved investigation of various biological complexes, such as metalloproteins or enzymes with metal-containing substrate, to obtain information about both metal-containing active site or substrate and the atomic structure of each conformation.