Overexpression, crystallization and preliminary X-ray crystallographic analysis of release factor eRF1-1 from Arabidopsis thaliana

Peptide release factor 1 (RF1) regulates the termination of translation in protein synthesis by recognizing the stop codons. The eukaryotic RF1s (eRF1s) from Arabidopsis thaliana and human have different stop-codon preferences even though they share high sequence similarity. Based on known RF1 structures, it has been suggested that the specificity depends on both the local structure and the domain arrangement, but the lack of a structure of Arabidopsis eRF1 hinders a detailed comparison. To reveal the mechanism of stop-codon recognition and compare it with that of human eRF1, one of the three Arabidopsis eRF1s, AteRF1-1, was studied and a preliminary X-ray crystallographic analysis is reported here. The protein was overexpressed in Escherichia coli and crystallized at room temperature using the vapour-diffusion method. Crystals were grown from 1.6 M lithium sulfate, 0.1 M Tris-HCl pH 8.0, 2%(v/v) PEG 400 and diffracted to 3.77 Å resolution. The data were processed in point group 622, with unit-cell parameters a = b = 136.6, c = 325.7 Å.