title: Covalent labelling of histones with aurothiomalate. Gold-labelled H2A-H2B dimers assemble to octamers, which form crystalline helical tubes.
abstract: Histone octamers were covalently labelled with aurothiomalate at amino groups by the method of carbodiimide activation. The labelling procedure was demonstrated to result in the specific covalent coupling through a single bond of the heavy metal atom label to protein amino groups. Such octamers were dissociated to yield soluble H2A-H2B dimers containing three gold atoms per dimer. The dimers were reconstituted with native H3-H4 tetramers to form labelled octamers, which were crystallized to form helical tubes. This strongly suggests that this procedure resulted in minimal changes of protein conformation.
mesh_terms: D000345:Affinity Labels; D002850:Chromatography, Gel; D003460:Crystallization; D004591:Electrophoresis, Polyacrylamide Gel; D006046:Gold; D006052:Gold Sodium Thiomalate; D006657:Histones / Q000378:metabolism*; D011487:Protein Conformation; D012995:Solubility
chemical_list: D000345:Affinity Labels; D006657:Histones; D006052:Gold Sodium Thiomalate; D006046:Gold