Use of Molecular Replacement to Determine the Phases of Crystal Structure of Taq DNA Polymerase

Taq DNA polymerase from Thermus aquaticus has been shown to be very useful in the polymerase chain reaction method, which is being used for amplifying DNA. Not only does Taq DNA polymerase have high commercial value commercial value for the polymerase chain reaction application, but it is also important in studying DNA replication, because it is apparently an homologue to E. coli DNA polymerase I, which has long been used for DNA replication study (Lawyer et ai., 1993). The crystal structure determination of Taq DNA polymerase was initiated. An X-ray diffraction pattern breaks down a crystal structure into discrete sine waves in a Fourier series. The original shape of a crystal object in terms of electron density may be represented as the sum of those sine waves with varying amplitudes and phases in three dimensions. The molecular replacement method was initially employed to provide phase information for the structure of Taq DNA polymerase. The rotation search using the program MERLOT resulted in a solution peak with 5.4 r.m.s. PC-refinement of the X-PLOR program verified the result and also optimized the orientation angles. Next, the translation search using the X-PLOR program resulted in a unique solution peak with 7.35 r.m.s. In addition, the translation search indicated $P3_121$ to be the true space group out of two possible ones. The phase information from the molecular replacement was useful in the MIR phasing experiment.