Protein Expression and Purification—A truncated extracellular form of human ACE2 (residues 1-740) was expressed in baculovirus and purified as described previously (8 (link)). The signal sequence (residues 1-18) is presumably removed upon secretion from Sf9 cells. The molecular mass of the purified enzyme is 89.6 kDa by matrix-assisted laser desorption ionization time-of-flight mass spectrometry, which is greater than the theoretical molecular mass of 83.5 kDa expected from the sequence (residues 19-740). The difference of ∼6 kDa is believed to be due to glycosylation at the seven predicted N-linked glycosylation sites for this protein.
Crystallization—Briefly, 2 μl of purified ACE2 (5 mg/ml) was combined with an equal volume of reservoir solution, and crystals were grown by hanging drop vapor diffusion at 16-18 °C. The best crystallization reservoir solution conditions for native ACE2 were found to be 100 m
Data Collection and Structure Determination—The best data set for native ACE2 was at 2.2-Å resolution and was collected at the Advanced Photon Source (Argonne National Laboratory). A total of 44 x-ray data sets were collected for native ACE2, including a large number of heavy atom soaks of atoms that had good anomalous signals. The data sets for each derivative were collected at different wavelengths to maximize the anomalous signals for the bound heavy atoms. Native ACE2 data were collected to 2.2-Å resolution at λ = 1.28 Å to maximize the anomalous signal at the zinc absorption edge.
The heavy atom positions were determined and confirmed by a combination of visual inspection of Patterson maps and automatic search procedures, which included SHAKE 'N BAKE (16 (link)) and SHELXD (17 (link)). The heavy atom parameters were refined and optimized using the computer programs SHARP (18 (link)), MLPHARE (19 ), and XHEAVY (20 ). The experimental phases were improved by solvent flattening and histogram matching.
Once the native ACE2 structure was determined, it was used to solve the inhibitor-bound structure of ACE2 to 3.0-Å resolution using molecular replacement methods that employed the program AMoRe in the CCP4 software suite (21 (link)). The native structure was split into two subdomains: subdomains I and II (see