issue contents

ISSN: 2052-2525

November 2019 issue

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editorial


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This Editorial considers the impact of recent work published in IUCrJ and other IUCr journals, as well as the relationship between IUCrJ and the other journals, in terms of where the most cited recent papers are used.

scientific commentaries


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Nydenova et al. [(2019), IUCrJ, 6, 1086–1098] determine structures of frozen-hydrated protein and nucleic acid assemblies using 100 keV electrons, and describe characteristics of electron microscopes designed to exploit advantages of a lower operating voltage for single-particle cryo-EM.

research letters


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In this study, an experimentally synthesized DHM LaNiO3 is discovered with many Dirac cones and complete spin polarization near the Fermi level via first principles; it is also shown that the crystal structures of these materials are strongly correlated with their physical properties.

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The ∼100 mutations used during the structural determination of GLP-1R suggest multiple mutagenesis strategies, which may find applications in the crystallization of G-protein-coupled receptors and other membrane proteins, and potentially in functional and pharmacological studies by locking proteins into specific conformations.

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The superior image quality given by the DE64 direct electron detector in counting mode is more important for high-resolution cryo-EM reconstructions than its superior throughput in integrating mode.

research papers



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Time-resolved structural studies are becoming an important tool in understanding biological function. Here we describe a cryo-EM grid freezing device capable of rapidly mixing and plunge freezing grids within 10 ms.

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A hydrogen-bond-directed [2+2] photodimerization performed in the solid state is used to generate a head-to-head (HH) cyclo­butane photoproduct functionalized with cis-phenolic and cis-pyridyl groups. The photoproduct self-assembles as a pure form in the solid state to form a rare three-dimensional hydrogen-bonded network with a topology that conforms to a mok net. The construction of the HH cyclo­butane is achieved using a newly introduced supramolecular protecting-group strategy.

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Data from several radiation-damage studies using protein crystals are reanalyzed to determine the local dose- and resolution-dependent decay of diffracted intensity at T = 100 K. The results are inconsistent with long-accepted models and with a proposed linear scaling between maximum tolerable dose and resolution, but are reproduced by a simple, physics-based model.

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A method (DeepRes) is presented to estimate a new local quality measure for 3D cryoEM maps that adopts the form of a `local resolution' type of information. DeepRes is fully automatic and parameter-free and avoids the issues of most current methods, such as their insensitivity to enhancements owing to B-factor sharpening, among others.

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The consistency and variability as well as self-assembly evolution mechanism of cresol–piperazine cocrystals are investigated by experiments and molecular simulation.

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The ability to rapidly obtain structures of protein–ligand complexes using X-ray crystallography is central to drug discovery, but the typical cryocooling of samples and the effects of the X-ray beam may distort the observed ligand binding. X-ray free-electron lasers (XFELs) have the promise to solve these issues, but methods to rapidly produce structures of protein–ligand complexes at XFELs have not yet been realized. Here, an efficient solution using high-throughput, fixed-target serial femtosecond crystallography at an XFEL is demonstrated.

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Several structures were determined by single-particle cryoEM at 100 keV and the implications for future electron cryomicroscopes are considered.

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Radiation damage is the most fundamental limitation for achieving high resolution in cryo-EM, and is expected to be reduced at liquid-helium temperature. Surprisingly, cryo-EM reconstructions of apoferritin samples cooled with liquid helium showed no improvement in resolution over liquid-nitro­gen-cooled samples, but showed substantially more beam-induced particle motion.


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The crystal structure of IdmH from the biosynthetic gene cluster for indanomycin is presented. NMR data show that this enzyme binds its postulated product, indanomycin, and QM/MM modelling of the reaction strongly supports the view that IdmH catalyses indane-ring formation in indanomycin biosynthesis via a Diels–Alder reaction.
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