High-Speed Force Spectroscopy for Single Protein Unfolding

Fidan Sumbul (1) , Arin Marchesi (1) , Hirohide Takahashi (2) , Simon Scheuring (2) , Felix Rico (2, 1)

1 LAI - Adhésion et Inflammation
2 Bio-AFM-Lab - BIO-AFM-LAB Bio Atomic Force Microscopy Laboratory

Single-molecule force spectroscopy (SMFS) measurements allow for quantification of the molecular forces required to unfold individual protein domains. Atomic force microscopy (AFM) is one of the long-established techniques for force spectroscopy (FS). Although FS at conventional AFM pulling rates provides valuable information on protein unfolding, in order to get a more complete picture of the mechanism, explore new regimes, and combine and compare experiments with simulations, we need higher pulling rates and μs-time resolution, now accessible via high-speed force spectroscopy (HS-FS). In this chapter, we provide a step-by-step protocol of HS-FS including sample preparation, measurements and analysis of the acquired data using HS-AFM with an illustrative example on unfolding of a well-studied concatamer made of eight repeats of the titin I91 domain.

Keywords: cohesion; Cohesin; high-speed force spectroscopy; atomic force microscopy; protein unfolding; titin; dockerin

Domains: Biological Physics [physics.bio-ph]

Fidan Sumbul, Arin Marchesi, Hirohide Takahashi, Simon Scheuring, Felix Rico. High-Speed Force Spectroscopy for Single Protein Unfolding. Methods in Molecular Biology, 2018, pp.243-264. ⟨10.1007/978-1-4939-8591-3_15⟩. ⟨hal-01838371⟩