Last week was all about big protein samples! I got an informative email update from Prof Susan Lea and Dr Justin Deme on the full-length huntingtin EM work (all 3144 amino acids) they are doing in Oxford. The grids are definitely getting better and hopefully we will have thin enough ice to do some serious data collection soon. Here is a picture of the latest grid:

I also got some data back from our eukaryotic expression system team who have been doing test expression work on large C-terminal constructs of huntingtin. My hunch is that from amino acid ~650, the huntingtin protein structure is a large and coninuous alpha-helical coil. As the preceding region ~450-650 is predicted to be highly disordered, I suspect that I may be able to make the huntingtin protein from ~650 to the very end. The data looks promising but more validation is required before we do any large scale protein production.