A Unique Tool for Cellular Structural Biology: In-cell NMR*
- From the ‡Magnetic Resonance Center (CERM),
- the §Department of Biomedical, Clinical and Experimental Sciences, and
- the ¶Department of Chemistry, University of Florence, Florence 50121, Italy
- ↵1 To whom correspondence should be addressed. E-mail: banci{at}cerm.unifi.it.
Abstract
Conventional structural and chemical biology approaches are applied to macromolecules extrapolated from their native context. When this is done, important structural and functional features of macromolecules, which depend on their native network of interactions within the cell, may be lost. In-cell nuclear magnetic resonance is a branch of biomolecular NMR spectroscopy that allows macromolecules to be analyzed in living cells, at the atomic level. In-cell NMR can be applied to several cellular systems to obtain biologically relevant structural and functional information. Here we summarize the existing approaches and focus on the applications to protein folding, interactions, and post-translational modifications.
- cell compartmentalization
- intracellular processing
- molecular cell biology
- nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR)
- post-translational modification (PTM)
- protein folding
- structural biology
- © 2016 by The American Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, Inc.
