Solving protein structure from sparse serial microcrystal diffraction data at a storage-ring synchrotron source

IUCrJ
Ti-Yen LanSol M Gruner

Abstract

In recent years, the success of serial femtosecond crystallography and the paucity of beamtime at X-ray free-electron lasers have motivated the development of serial microcrystallography experiments at storage-ring synchrotron sources. However, especially at storage-ring sources, if a crystal is too small it will have suffered significant radiation damage before diffracting a sufficient number of X-rays into Bragg peaks for peak-indexing software to determine the crystal orientation. As a consequence, the data frames of small crystals often cannot be indexed and are discarded. Introduced here is a method based on the expand-maximize-compress (EMC) algorithm to solve protein structures, specifically from data frames for which indexing methods fail because too few X-rays are diffracted into Bragg peaks. The method is demonstrated on a real serial microcrystallography data set whose signals are too weak to be indexed by conventional methods. In spite of the daunting background scatter from the sample-delivery medium, it was still possible to solve the protein structure at 2.1 Å resolution. The ability of the EMC algorithm to analyze weak data frames will help to reduce sample consumption. It will also allow serial microcrystallogr...Continue Reading

References

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Mar 14, 2018·Acta Crystallographica. Section D, Structural Biology·Liz PottertonMarcin Wojdyr

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Citations

Mar 2, 2019·Acta Crystallographica. Section D, Structural Biology·James M Holton
Mar 15, 2019·IUCrJ·Jennifer L WiermanAaron D Finke
Jun 27, 2019·Journal of Applied Crystallography·Xuanxuan LiHaiguang Liu
Aug 28, 2020·Current Opinion in Structural Biology·Arwen R Pearson, Pedram Mehrabi

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Methods Mentioned

BETA
X-ray
strong
crystal diffraction
chips
chip
weak

Software Mentioned

REFMAC
PyMOL
MOLREP

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