High symmetry, to the extent that it is preserved in the assembled complex, provides further imaging advantages through symmetry-averaging protocols. By fusing to a tetrahedral complex, each particle contains 12 copies of the DARPin adaptor the polyvalent nature of the scaffold provides multiple sites of attachment, and therefore multiple independent views of the cargo from a single particle. Through selection experiments on libraries of DAPRins bearing sequence variation in their loops, DARPins can be obtained to bind diverse cargo proteins with high affinity and specificity, and with retention of their structural integrity in the bound state. In this work, a modular adaptor protein, Designed Ankyrin Repeat Proteins (DARPin), was fused to an engineered tetrahedrally symmetric (n=12) protein complex, using a continuous α-helical connection to promote rigidity. designed a new protein scaffold to simultaneously address the key issues of flexibility and modularity that had limited previous studies. To avoid laborious molecular engineering work and provide the most utility, an ideal scaffold would provide a facile route for rigidly attaching diverse cargo molecules for imaging, without extensive re-engineering. These issues point to a further concern for scaffolding approaches in the molecular engineering effort required. Similarly, covalent attachment between proteins by way of chemical linkers generally introduces single-bonds between the components, and this also allows potentially problematic degrees of rotation. Genetically fusing one protein to another generally results in highly flexible arrangements, owing to effectively free rotation about the phi and psi backbone torsion angles at the point of fusion. Even moderate degrees of flexibility can have major confounding effects. If the attachment between cargo and scaffold is completely flexible, then the presence of the scaffold provides little help in narrowing down the position and orientation of the cargo, as required for its image reconstruction. While the idea of attaching a smaller protein to a larger scaffold seems straightforward, serious technical challenges arise, including most notably flexibility. One strategy for circumventing the size limitation in cryo-EM is to attach a smaller imaging target to a larger macromolecular structure known to be amenable to imaging the former can be described as the ‘cargo’ and the latter as the ‘scaffold’. ![]() The inherent challenges and future design efforts are highlighted in this article. ![]() Recent efforts to break through this lower size limit include engineering large scaffolds to rigidly display multiple small proteins for imaging. Although most cellular proteins are less than 50 kDa, so far just a few amenable cases have been solved by cryo-EM. Cryo-EM relies on the accurate assignment of particle location and orientation from intrinsically noisy projection images, a procedure that becomes more challenging for smaller proteins due to their lower signal-to-noise ratios. Single particle cryo-electron microscopy (cryo-EM) has become a popular structural biology tool, enabling many targets such as viruses, large protein complexes, and oligomeric membrane proteins to be resolved to atomic resolution. Development of imaging scaffolds for cryo-electron microscopy
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