Direct methods in protein electron crystallography - beef liver catalase in its fully hydrated form at room temperature

The crystal structure of beef liver catalase was determined ab initio in projection to 9 Å resolution using electron diffraction data at room temperature from hydrated specimens maintained in an environmental chamber in the electron microscope. A conserva­tive combination of symbolic addition with maximum entropy and likelihood led to a model with a Patterson correlation coefficient to the observed data. This independent solution could then be compared favorably to a previous 23 Å analysis of electron micrographs from frozen hydrated preparations. Prediction of the higher-resolution structure by extension of the lower-resolution image-based phase basis set also gave a good match to the direct-methods solution, particularly for the most intense reflections.