The initial motivation for crystallization of Bovine Serum Albumin (BSA) is an interest to understand how thiomolybdates interact with BSA and suppress copper intake from the food sources of cattle. The main objective of my research work is to determine the crystal structure of BSA using X-ray crystallography techniques. Once the tertiary structure of BSA is determined, its structural information can help us to study the interactions between BSA, copper, and thiomolybdates, and to understand the way in which thiomolybdates render copper unavailable in cattle. Many trials for the optimal crystallization conditions of BSA were attempted in order to grow high-quality BSA crystals. However, all crystals only diffract to 8 Å resolution limit. Such resolution is not sufficient to solve the tertiary structure of BSA.
Another objective of my research was to crystallize Thioredoxin-2 (Trx-2) to obtain larger crystals which may lead to high resolution crystallographic data, better than 2.4 Å, for protein structure refinement. This is because Trx-2 diffraction data that had been collected are split at high resolution. The ambiguous data at high resolution might impede the structure refinement and even can cause the three-dimensional structure of Trx-2 to not be refined successfully. A number of attempts were conducted for crystallizing Trx-2 to grow bigger and higher quality of Trx-2 crystals. However, the improvement of crystal dimensions was not significant, the diffraction resolution limits are similar to previous published data, and the split data at high resolution was still observed.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:USASK/oai:usask.ca:etd-01112005-142501 |
| Date | 20 January 2005 |
| Creators | Tai, HengChiat |
| Contributors | Reid, R. Stephen, Quail, J. Wilson, Pedras, M. Soledade C., Loewen, Michele C., Sanders, David A. R. |
| Publisher | University of Saskatchewan |
| Source Sets | University of Saskatchewan Library |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | text |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Source | http://library.usask.ca/theses/available/etd-01112005-142501/ |
| Rights | unrestricted, I hereby certify that, if appropriate, I have obtained and attached hereto a written permission statement from the owner(s) of each third party copyrighted matter to be included in my thesis, dissertation, or project report, allowing distribution as specified below. I certify that the version I submitted is the same as that approved by my advisory committee. I hereby grant to University of Saskatchewan or its agents the non-exclusive license to archive and make accessible, under the conditions specified below, my thesis, dissertation, or project report in whole or in part in all forms of media, now or hereafter known. I retain all other ownership rights to the copyright of the thesis, dissertation or project report. I also retain the right to use in future works (such as articles or books) all or part of this thesis, dissertation, or project report. |
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