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Enzyme activity varies with temperature. Unlike small-molecule catalysts, the structural ensembles of enzymes can change substantially with temperature, but it is unclear how this modulates temperature dependent activity. Here, multi-temperature X-ray crystallography was used to record structural changes from -20C to 40C for a mesophilic enzyme in complex with inhibitors mimicking substrate-, intermediate-, and product-bound states, representative of major complexes on the reaction coordinate. Inhibitors, substrates and active site loops increasingly populated catalytically competent conformations as temperature increased. These changes occurred even in temperature ranges where kinetic measurements showed roughly linear Arrhenius/Eyring behavior, where parameters characterizing the system are assumed to be temperature independent. Simple analysis shows that linear Arrhenius/Eyring behavior can still be observed when the underlying activation energy/enthalpy values vary with temperature. Our results indicate a critical role for temperature dependent atomic-resolution structural data in interpreting temperature dependent kinetic data from enzymatic systems. 

Time-resolved X-ray crystallography has great promise to illuminate structure–function relations and key steps of enzymatic reactions with atomic resolution. The dominant methods for chemically-initiated reactions require complex instrumentation at the X-ray beamline, significant effort to operate and maintain this instrumentation, and enormous numbers (∼10⁵–10⁹) of crystals per time point. We describe instrumentation and methods that enable high-throughput time-resolved study of biomolecular systems using standard crystallography sample supports and mail-in X-ray data collection at standard high-throughput cryocrystallography synchrotron beamlines. The instrumentation allows rapid reaction initiation by mixing of crystals and substrate/ligand solution, rapid capture of structural states via thermal quenching with no pre-cooling perturbations, and yields time resolutions in the single-millisecond range, comparable to the best achieved by any non-photo-initiated method in both crystallography and cryo-electron microscopy. Our approach to reaction initiation has the advantages of simplicity, robustness, low cost, adaptability to diverse ligand solutions and small minimum volume requirements, making it well suited to routine laboratory use and to high-throughput screening. We report the detailed characterization of instrument performance, present structures of binding ofN-acetylglucosamine to lysozyme at time points from 8 ms to 2 s determined using only one crystal per time point, and discuss additional improvements that will push time resolution toward 1 ms.