In a new paper “Time-of-flight neutron diffraction study of bovine γ-chymotrypsin at the Protein Crystallography Station” published in this month’s edition of the journal Acta Cryst F, Biochemistry grad student Louis Lazar and co-workers from the Petsko-Ringe lab report progress on their project to determine exact hydrogen positions in proteins using neutron diffraction.

Neutron diffraction was chosen, as opposed to X-ray diffraction, because one can visualize hydrogen species directly using neutrons, while it is extremely difficult and in most cases impossible to do so using X-ray diffraction. They chose the protein γ-chymotrypsin in order to determine hydrogen positions, as it fills the necessary requirements to be suitable for a neutron diffraction experiment. These requirements include a very large crystal size (> 1 mm³), moderately sized unit cell axes (no dimension greater than 100 Å), and it must be very stable as well as well-characterized. γ-chymotrypsin is the stereotypical serine protease, cleaving C-terminal to aliphatic and aromatic residues and containing a catalytic triad of serine, histidine, and aspartate. This information on hydrogen placement can then be applied to improve computational methods in which said placement is paramount, such as molecular modeling and rational drug design.

The paper details the collection of neutron data at pD (pH*) 7.1, with the help of the scientists at the Los Alamos National Laboratory. In particular, from the initial maps, they note that the catalytic histidine is doubly protonated, while the serine and aspartate making up the catalytic triad do not show density for the presence of deuterium. In order to complete the study of γ-chymotrypsin, data at a variety of pH values must be collected; data at pD (pH*) 5.6 has already been collected (Acta Cryst F65, 317-320), and data at pD (pH*) 9.0 will be collected in the future.

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