Bacillus subtilis spore coat is a bacterial proteinaceous structure with amazing characteristics of self-organization, unique resiliency, toughness and flexibility in the same time. The spore coat represents a complex multilayered protein structure which is composed of over 80 coat proteins. Some of these proteins form two dimensional crystal structures who's low resolution ternary structure as was determined by electron microscopy. However, there are no 3D structure of these proteins known, due to a problem of preparing 3D crystals which could be analyzed by synchrotron X-ray sources. In the present study, Grazing-Incidence Wide-Angle X-ray Scattering (GIWAXS) was applied to investigate a diffraction pattern of CotY 2D crystals formed on Langmuir monolayer films. We observed two distinct diffraction rings and their position corresponds to a structure with the lattice spacing of 10.6 Å and 5.0 Å, respectively. Obtaining diffractions of 2D crystals pave the way to determination of 3D structure of coat proteins by using strong X-ray sources.
Keywords: 2D protein crystals; Bacillus subtilis; CotY; Spore coat; X-ray scattering.
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