TY - JOUR T1 - Ultrafast Laser-Probing Spectrocopy for Studying Molecular Structure of Polymeric Proteins JF - bioRxiv DO - 10.1101/081943 SP - 081943 AU - Huihun Jung AU - Chester J. Szwejkowski AU - Abdon Pena-Francesch AU - Benjamin Allen AU - Şahin Kaya Özdemir AU - Patrick Hopkins AU - Melik C. Demirel Y1 - 2016/01/01 UR - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2016/10/19/081943.abstract N2 - We report the development of a new technique to screen protein crystallinity quantitatively based on laser-probing spectroscopy with sub-picosecond resolution. First, we show theoretically that the temperature dependence of the refractive index of a polymeric protein is correlated to its crystallinity. Then, we performed time-domain thermo-transmission experiments on purified semi-crystalline proteins, both native and recombinant (i.e., silk and squid ring teeth), and also on intact E. coli cells bearing overexpressed recombinant protein. Our results demonstrate, for the first time, quantification of crystallinity in real time for polymeric proteins. Our approach can potentially be used for screening an ultra-large number of polymeric proteins in vivo. ER -