The Structure of the Aquaporin-1 Water Channel: A Comparison between Cryo-electron Microscopy and X-ray Crystallography

Three different medium-resolution structures of the human water channel aquaporin-1 (AQP1) have been solved by cryo-electron microscopy (cryo-EM) during the last two years. Recently, the structure of the strongly related bovine AQP1 was solved by X-ray crystallography at higher resolution, allowing a validation of the original medium-resolution structures, and providing a good indication for the strengths and limitations of state of the art cryo-EM methods. We present a detailed comparison between the different models, which shows that overall, the structures are highly similar, deviating less than 2.5 Å from each other in the helical backbone regions. The two original cryo-EM structures, however, also show a number of significant deviations from the X-ray structure, both in the backbone positions of the transmembrane helices and in the location of the amino acid side-chains facing the pore. In contrast, the third cryo-EM structure that included information from the X-ray structure of the homologous bacterial glycerol facilitator GlpF and that was subsequently refined against cryo-EM AQP1 data, shows a root mean square deviation of 0.9 Å from the X-ray structure in the helical backbone regions.