Investigation of the structure of a filamentous bacteriophage (fd) using high and low-angle neutron scattering
Filamentous bacteriophages are flexible rod-like virions composed of a single-stranded circular DNA at the core surrounded by multiple copies of a coat protein. They provide good models of high interest for the study of macromolecular structure and interactions. Here we focus on the fd strain. Over the years models for the coat proteins have been suggested but there remains a number of uncertainties on the structure of the coat protein and the organisation of the nucleic acid. The latter has revealed itself to be extremely difficult to investigate using X-ray diffraction. In recent preliminary work on D19, we have recorded novel high-angle fibre diffraction data from an array of magnetically aligned samples of fd. The data, although weak, show high-angle diffraction to a resolution of ~3Å as well as evidence of low-angle diffraction outside the scope of D19. In test experiments on D22, we demonstrated the feasibility of using contrast variation to probe the low resolution structure of the virion. In this proposal we seek beamtime to extend this work by (i) improving the counting statistics for the high-angle data on D19 (ii) recording an accurate contrast variation dataset on D22.
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MOSSOU Estelle; CHEN Pan; FORSYTH Victor Trevor; LANGAN Paul; MARVIN D.; NISHIYAMA Yoshiharu; PORCAR Lionel; STRAUS Suzana and SYMMONDS Martyn. (2012). Investigation of the structure of a filamentous bacteriophage (fd) using high and low-angle neutron scattering. Institut Laue-Langevin (ILL) doi:10.5291/ILL-DATA.8-01-401
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