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Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America logoLink to Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America
. 1990 Oct;87(19):7570–7573. doi: 10.1073/pnas.87.19.7570

Direct determination of phospholipid lamellar structure at 0.34-nm resolution.

D L Dorset 1, E Beckmann 1, F Zemlin 1
PMCID: PMC54789  PMID: 2217186

Abstract

Low-dose, high-resolution electron microscopy combined with conventional direct-phasing methods based on the estimates of triplet-structure invariants are used to determine phase values for all observed electron-diffraction-structure factor magnitudes from epitaxially oriented multilamellar paracrystals of the phosphospholipid 1,2-dihexadecyl-sn-glycerophosphoethanolamine. The reverse Fourier transform of these phase-structure factors is a one-dimensional electrostatic potential map that strongly resembles the electron-density maps calculated from similar x-ray-diffraction data. Determination of the phase values for the electron-diffraction data with structure invariants alone is nearly as successful as the combined use of two separate methods, assigning values to 13 of the 16 reflections--i.e., the electrostatic potential map closely resembles the one calculated with all data.

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Selected References

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