Determination of Molecular Structures of HIV Envelope Glycoproteins using Cryo-Electron Tomography and Automated Sub-tomogram AveragingJoel R. Meyerson 1,2, Tommi A. White 1, Donald Bliss 3, Amy Moran 3, Alberto Bartesaghi 1, Mario J. Borgnia 1, M. Jason V. de la Cruz 1, David Schauder 1, Lisa M. Hartnell 1, Rachna Nandwani 1,4, Moez Dawood 5, Brianna Kim 6, Jun Hong Kim 7, John Sununu 8, Lisa Yang 9, Siddhant Bhatia 10, Carolyn Subramaniam 1, Darrell E. Hurt 11, Laurent Gaudreault 12, Sriram Subramaniam 1
1Laboratory of Cell Biology, Center for Cancer Research, National Cancer Institute, National Institutes of Health, 2The Medical Research Council Mitochondrial Biology Unit, University of Cambridge , 3National Library of Medicine, National Institutes of Health, 4Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 5William Fremd High School, 6University of Virginia , 7Duke University , 8Yale University, 9University of Notre Dame , 10Washington University in St. Louis , 11Bioinformatics and Computational Biosciences Branch, National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, National Institutes of Health, 12Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology
The protocol describes a high-throughput approach to determining structures of membrane proteins using cryo-electron tomography and 3D image processing. It covers the details of specimen preparation, data collection, data processing and interpretation, and concludes with the production of a representative target for the approach, the HIV-1 Envelope glycoprotein. These computational procedures are designed in a way that enables researchers and students to work remotely and contribute to data processing and structural analysis.