Division of Structural Studies, MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology, Francis Crick Avenue, Cambridge, CB1 0QH (UK).
Chemphyschem. 2013 Oct 7;14(14):3209-14. doi: 10.1002/cphc.201300606. Epub 2013 Jul 31.
A widely studied achiral porphyrin, which is highly soluble in aqueous solutions (TPPS4), is shown to self-assemble into helical nanotubes. These were imaged by electron cryo-microscopy and a state-of-the-art image analysis allows building a map at ∼5 Å resolution, one of the highest obtained so far for molecular materials. The authors were able to trace the apparent symmetry breaking to existing nuclei in the "as received samples", while carefully purified samples show that both handnesses occur in equal amounts.
一种广泛研究的手性卟啉，在水溶液中高度溶解（TPPS4），被证明可以自组装成螺旋纳米管。这些通过电子低温显微镜成像，最先进的图像分析可以构建出分辨率约为 5Å 的图谱，这是迄今为止获得的分子材料中最高的分辨率之一。作者能够将明显的对称破缺追溯到“原始样品”中的现有核，而经过仔细纯化的样品表明，两种手性的出现频率相等。
