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Nucleic acid X-ray crystallography via direct selenium derivatization

2011; Royal Society of Chemistry; Volume: 40; Issue: 9 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1039/c1cs15020k

1460-4744

Lina Lin, Jia Sheng, Zhen Huang,

DNA Repair Mechanisms

X-ray crystallography has proven to be an essential tool for structural studies of bio-macromolecules at the atomic level. There are two major bottle-neck problems in the macromolecular crystal structure determination: phasing and crystallization. Although the selenium derivatization is routinely used for solving novel protein structures through the MAD phasing technique, the phase problem is still a critical issue in nucleic acid crystallography. The background and current progress of using direct selenium-derivatization of nucleic acids (SeNA) to solve the phase problem and to facilitate nucleic acid crystallization for X-ray crystallography are summarized in this tutorial review.