An Effective Deuterium Exchange Method for Neutron Crystal Structure Analysis with Unfolding–Refolding Processes

A method of hydrogen/deuterium (H/D) exchange with an unfolding–refolding process has been applied to hen egg-white lysozyme (HWL), and accurate evaluation of its deuteration was carried out by time-of-flight mass spectroscopy. Neutron crystallography requires a suitable crystal with enough deuterium exchanged in the protein to decrease incoherent scattering from hydrogens. It is very expensive to prepare a fully deuterated protein, and therefore a simple H/D exchange technique is desirable for this purpose. Acid or base addition to protein solutions with heating effectively increased the number of deuterium up to more than 20 % of that of all hydrogen atoms, and refolded structures were determined by X-ray structure analysis at 1.8 Å resolution. Refolded HWL had increased deuterium content in its protein core and its native structure, determined at atomic resolution, was fully preserved.