Crystallization of Membrane Proteins: Merohedral Twinning of Crystals

Abstract

Membrane proteins are the main functional units of biological membranes. They represent roughly one-third of the proteins encoded in the genome and about 70% of drugs are targeted to membrane proteins. X-ray protein crystallography is one of the most powerful tools to determine protein structure and to provide a basis for understanding molecular mechanisms of protein function. Despite an obvious importance of membrane protein only about 1% of structures in the Protein Data Bank (PDB) are of this type. Moreover, although the number of membrane protein structures deposited to PDB since 1985, date of the first membrane protein structure [1], is increasing it is not yet comparable with the rate achieved for soluble proteins [2]. Currently, the PDB contains more than 70,000 structures, and the structures of membrane proteins do not exceed 500 [3]. Considerable effort made in several laboratories in the last years towards extension of high-throughput crystallography to membrane proteins open a hope of correcting this imbalance. Nevertheless significant challenges must be overcome to achieve this goal. Two major problems toward the determination of membrane proteins structures are: the production of pure, stable and functional protein solubilized in detergents, and the growth of crystals suitable for X-ray crystallography. The latter is often defined as major bottleneck of structural biology of membrane proteins. For a long time, the vapor diffusion method has been the only method which was used to crystallize membrane proteins. This method, which is based on a well-developed approach of crystallization of water soluble proteins, led to relative success, however, it failed to produce crystals of some important membrane proteins. Quite recently new methods were introduced. One of the most promising new method to overcome this problem is the so called in meso crystallization approach where lipid systems (e.g. the lipid cubic phase (LCP)) are used as a crystallization matrix. It has been demonstrated that these methods are applicable to different membrane proteins including G-protein-coupled receptors (GPCR), membrane protein complexes and others. One of the first important breakthroughs was bacteriorhodopsin (bR) which for a long time failed to be