Jun Liu

Institute of Molecular Biophysics
Research Associate
phone: (850) 644-5606
Web page

I am working on 3D reconstruction of chicken gazzard alpha-actinin by cryo-electron microscopy. A 3D atomic model of alpha-actinin was builted and refined against the 3D EM density map with 2.0nm resolution. To demonstrate how the alpha-actinin is cross-linked with F-actin, a tilted series of F-actin bundles was collected on Philips CM300-FEG electron microscope from -70 degree to +70 degree. Electron tomography was applied to generate the 3D structure of F-actin bundles. This project is an important step to demostrate the 3D structure of alpha-actinin and its structural relationship with F-actin.

PUBLICATIONS

Jun Liu, Thomas Wendt, Dianne W. Taylor and Kenneth A. Taylor. Refined model of the 10S conformation of smooth muscle myosin by cryoEM 3-D image reconstruction. J. Mol. Biol. 329(5), 963-972 (2003)
Ping Zhu, Elena Chertova, Julian Bess, Jr., Jeffrey D. Lifson, Larry O. Arthur, Jun Liu, Kenneth A. Taylor, and Kenneth H. Roux. Electron tomography analysis of envelope glycoprotein trimers on HIV and simian immunodeficiency virus virions. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. 100(26), 15812-15817 (2003)
Jun Liu, Dianne W. Taylor and Kenneth A. Taylor. A 3-D reconstruction of smooth muscle a-actinin by cryoEM reveals two different conformations at the actin binding region. J. Mol. Biol. 338(1), 115-125 (2004).
Jun Liu, Mary C. Reedy, Yale E. Goldman, Clara Franzini-Armstrong, Hiroyuki Sasaki, Richard T. Tregear, Carmen Lucaveche, Hanspeter Winkler, Bruce A. J. Baumann, John M. Squire, Thomas C. Irving, Michael K. Reedy, and Kenneth A. Taylor. Electron tomography of fast frozen, stretched rigor fibers reveals elastic distortions in the myosin crossbridges. J. Struct. Biol. (in press)