Structure of catalase determined by MicroED

Abstract

MicroED is a recently developed method that uses electron diffraction for structure determination from very small three-dimensional crystals of biological material. Previously we used a series of still diffraction patterns to determine the structure of lysozyme at 2.9 Å resolution with MicroED (Shi et al., 2013). Here we present the structure of bovine liver catalase determined from a single crystal at 3.2 Å resolution by MicroED. The data were collected by continuous rotation of the sample under constant exposure and were processed and refined using standard programs for X-ray crystallography. The ability of MicroED to determine the structure of bovine liver catalase, a protein that has long resisted atomic analysis by traditional electron crystallography, demonstrates the potential of this method for structure determination.