Towards community-driven visual proteomics with large-scale cryo-electron tomography of Chlamydomonas reinhardtii

In situ cryo-electron tomography (cryo-ET) has emerged as the method of choice to investigate structures of biomolecules in their native context. However, challenges remain in the efficient production of large-scale cryo-ET datasets, as well as the community sharing of this information-rich data. Here, we applied a cryogenic plasma-based focused ion beam (cryo-PFIB) instrument for high-throughput milling of the green alga Chlamydomonas reinhardtii, a useful model organism for in situ visualization of numerous fundamental cellular processes. Combining cryo-PFIB sample preparation with recent advances in cryo-ET data acquisition and processing, we generated a dataset of 1829 reconstructed and annotated tomograms, which we provide as a community resource to drive method development and inspire biological discovery. To assay the quality of this dataset, we performed subtomogram averaging (STA) of both soluble and membrane-bound complexes ranging in size from {\textgreater}3 MDa to ∼200 kDa, including 80S ribosomes, Rubisco, nucleosomes, microtubules, clathrin, photosystem II, and mitochondrial ATP synthase. The majority of these density maps reached sub-nanometer resolution, demonstrating the potential of this C. reinhardtii dataset, as well as the promise of modern cryo-ET workflows and open data sharing towards visual proteomics.

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Recommended citation: Ron Kelley^*, Sagar Khavnekar^*, Ricardo Righetto^*, Jessica Heebner^*, Martin Obr^*, Xianjun Zhang^*, Saikat Chakraborty^*, Grigory Tagiltsev^*, Alicia Michael^*, Sofie Dorst^*, Florent Waltz, Caitlyn McCafferty, Lorenz Lamm, Simon Zufferey, Philippe Stappen, Hugo Hoek, Wojciech Wietrzynski, Pavol Harar, William Wan, John Briggs, Jürgen Plitzko, Benjamin Engel, Abhay Kotecha, "Towards community-driven visual proteomics with large-scale cryo-electron tomography of Chlamydomonas reinhardtii." bioRxiv, 2024.
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