Cloning, expression, purification, crystallization and preliminary X-ray analysis of human liver...

Human liver glyceraldehyde-3-phosphate dehydrogenase (GAPDH) was purified and crystallized using PEG 3350 as a precipitant. However, the crystals were extremely fragile towards osmotic shock. A 1% change in PEG 3350 content causes destruction of the crystals. After many trials for freezing the crystals, X-ray diffraction data from a native crystal were collected at 2.8 A resolution using as a cryoprotectant a mixture consisting of paraffin oil and Paratone-N in a 3:1 ratio and a cryoloop covered with Formver film. Crystals belong to space group P2(1), with unit-cell parameters a = 63.23, b = 97.84, c = 84.23 A, beta = 104.1 degrees. Molecular replacement with a starting model consisting of a homology model based on the low-resolution structure of human skeletal muscle GAPDH, which has 90% identical residues with the liver protein, led to a solution. Most of the current model was assigned properly in the electron-density map, but the map corresponding to some important regions containing the phosphate-binding loop was ambiguous. It is planned to crystallize human liver GAPDH in the presence of phosphate ions and/or some kind of inhibitor in order to fix the flexible region.