Chemistry and mass spectrometry for protein structure determination in living cells

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Abstract/Contents

Abstract
Protein structures speed discovery of life's molecular basis, but the artificial conditions of our structural techniques often disrupt natural protein behaviors. This could be sidestepped by chemically crosslinking adjacent residues together while a protein is still in its native cell. The protein could then be extracted and digested into mass spec--amenable peptides so the crosslinks can be seen by high-throughput mass spec. This would make a list of residue adjacencies useful to common structure determination software. Unfortunately, easily detectable crosslinkers are long and therefore vague about just how adjacent crosslinked residues are. This is because they facilitate detection by incorporating bulky moieties with distinctive behaviors during mass spec and purifiable tags. We show that a mass spec behavior ideal for crosslink detection can be encoded in a single well-placed atom in the crosslink. We also purify crosslinked peptides without adding anything to the crosslinker by inventing a method that isolates molecules with two peptidic N-termini. This frees us up to design crosslinking agents uncompromisingly tailored for high-resolution results. We synthesize these designs and investigate their utility.

Description

Type of resource text
Form electronic resource; remote; computer; online resource
Extent 1 online resource.
Place California
Place [Stanford, California]
Publisher [Stanford University]
Copyright date 2019; ©2019
Publication date 2019; 2019
Issuance monographic
Language English

Creators/Contributors

Author Wulff, Bjoern Erik
Degree supervisor Harbury, Pehr
Thesis advisor Harbury, Pehr
Thesis advisor Das, Rhiju
Thesis advisor Elias, Joshua
Thesis advisor Li, Lingyin
Degree committee member Das, Rhiju
Degree committee member Elias, Joshua
Degree committee member Li, Lingyin
Associated with Stanford University, Department of Biochemistry.

Subjects

Genre Theses
Genre Text

Bibliographic information

Statement of responsibility Bjoern-Erik Wulff.
Note Submitted to the Department of Biochemistry.
Thesis Thesis Ph.D. Stanford University 2019.
Location electronic resource

Access conditions

Copyright
© 2019 by Bjoern Erik Wulff
License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial 3.0 Unported license (CC BY-NC).

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