Characterizing the HIV-1 intasome requires fighting against time. At roughly 670kDa, this large, asymmetrical assembly of 16 subunits is too unstable for standard structural toolkits. While mass photometry can weigh individual particles of any shape, it requires highly diluted environments. Manual dilution is too slow; the subunits separate before measurement.
This application note describes how a microfluidic rapid-dilution chip solves this problem. Capable of thinning samples up to 10,000-fold in under 37 milliseconds, the chip delivers the intasome to the mass photometer intact, where its stoichiometries can be resolved.
Download the application note to
- See the dominant population shift toward heavier complexes as integrase rises from 1 to 500 nM
- Learn why the lens epithelium-derived growth factor p75 is required for intasome assembly
- Examine broad mass distributions that can span up to 33 possible assembly stoichiometries within a single sample
