scholarly journals In vivo crystallography at X-ray free-electron lasers: the next generation of structural biology?

2014 ◽  
Vol 369 (1647) ◽  
pp. 20130497 ◽  
Author(s):  
François-Xavier Gallat ◽  
Naohiro Matsugaki ◽  
Nathan P. Coussens ◽  
Koichiro J. Yagi ◽  
Marion Boudes ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Structural Biology ◽  
Free Electron ◽  
Free Electron Laser ◽  
Protein Crystal ◽  
X Ray ◽  
Sample Characterization ◽  
The One ◽  
Serial Femtosecond Crystallography

The serendipitous discovery of the spontaneous growth of protein crystals inside cells has opened the field of crystallography to chemically unmodified samples directly available from their natural environment. On the one hand, through in vivo crystallography, protocols for protein crystal preparation can be highly simplified, although the technique suffers from difficulties in sampling, particularly in the extraction of the crystals from the cells partly due to their small sizes. On the other hand, the extremely intense X-ray pulses emerging from X-ray free-electron laser (XFEL) sources, along with the appearance of serial femtosecond crystallography (SFX) is a milestone for radiation damage-free protein structural studies but requires micrometre-size crystals. The combination of SFX with in vivo crystallography has the potential to boost the applicability of these techniques, eventually bringing the field to the point where in vitro sample manipulations will no longer be required, and direct imaging of the crystals from within the cells will be achievable. To fully appreciate the diverse aspects of sample characterization, handling and analysis, SFX experiments at the Japanese SPring-8 angstrom compact free-electron laser were scheduled on various types of in vivo grown crystals. The first experiments have demonstrated the feasibility of the approach and suggest that future in vivo crystallography applications at XFELs will be another alternative to nano-crystallography.

Time-Resolved Serial Femtosecond Crystallography at the European X-ray Free Electron Laser

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marius Schmidt ◽  
Suraj Pandey ◽  
Adrian Mancuso ◽  
Richard Bean
Keyword(s):  
Free Electron ◽  
Free Electron Laser ◽  
Crystallographic Data ◽  
Time Resolved ◽  
X Ray ◽  
Serial Femtosecond Crystallography

Abstract This protocol introduces step by step into the collection of time resolved crystallographic data and their analysis at the European Free Electron Laser.

scholarly journals Liquid sample delivery techniques for serial femtosecond crystallography

2014 ◽  
Vol 369 (1647) ◽  
pp. 20130337 ◽  
Author(s):  
Uwe Weierstall
Keyword(s):  
Flow Rate ◽  
Free Electron ◽  
Repetition Rate ◽  
Free Electron Laser ◽  
Room Temperature ◽  
Liquid Flow Rate ◽  
Free Electron Lasers ◽  
Liquid Sample ◽  
X Ray ◽  
Serial Femtosecond Crystallography

X-ray free-electron lasers overcome the problem of radiation damage in protein crystallography and allow structure determination from micro- and nanocrystals at room temperature. To ensure that consecutive X-ray pulses do not probe previously exposed crystals, the sample needs to be replaced with the X-ray repetition rate, which ranges from 120 Hz at warm linac-based free-electron lasers to 1 MHz at superconducting linacs. Liquid injectors are therefore an essential part of a serial femtosecond crystallography experiment at an X-ray free-electron laser. Here, we compare different techniques of injecting microcrystals in solution into the pulsed X-ray beam in vacuum. Sample waste due to mismatch of the liquid flow rate to the X-ray repetition rate can be addressed through various techniques.

Potential impact of an X-ray free electron laser on structural biology

2004 ◽  
Vol 71 (3-4) ◽  
pp. 905-916 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard Neutze ◽  
Gösta Huldt ◽  
Janos Hajdu ◽  
David van der Spoel
Keyword(s):  
Structural Biology ◽  
Free Electron ◽  
Free Electron Laser ◽  
X Ray ◽  
Potential Impact

scholarly journals Serial crystallography using automated drop dispensing

2021 ◽  
Vol 28 (5) ◽  
Author(s):  
Zhen Su ◽  
Joshua Cantlon ◽  
Lacey Douthit ◽  
Max Wiedorn ◽  
Sébastien Boutet ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Free Electron Laser ◽  
Protein Crystal ◽  
Cross Contamination ◽  
X Ray ◽  
On Demand ◽  
Drop On Demand ◽  
Serial Crystallography ◽  
Cycling System ◽  
Serial Femtosecond Crystallography

Automated, pulsed liquid-phase sample delivery has the potential to greatly improve the efficiency of both sample and photon use at pulsed X-ray facilities. In this work, an automated drop on demand (DOD) system that accelerates sample exchange for serial femtosecond crystallography (SFX) is demonstrated. Four different protein crystal slurries were tested, and this technique is further improved here with an automatic sample-cycling system whose effectiveness was verified by the indexing results. Here, high-throughput SFX screening is shown to be possible at free-electron laser facilities with very low risk of cross contamination and minimal downtime. The development of this technique will significantly reduce sample consumption and enable structure determination of proteins that are difficult to crystallize in large quantities. This work also lays the foundation for automating sample delivery.

scholarly journals Co-crystal structure of the iMango-III fluorescent RNA aptamer using an X-ray free-electron laser

2019 ◽  
Vol 75 (8) ◽  
pp. 547-551 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert J. Trachman ◽  
Jason R. Stagno ◽  
Chelsie Conrad ◽  
Christopher P. Jones ◽  
Pontus Fischer ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Crystal Structure ◽  
Single Crystal ◽  
Free Electron ◽  
Free Electron Laser ◽  
Structural Model ◽  
Data Sets ◽  
Data Set ◽  
X Ray ◽  
Turn On

Turn-on aptamers are in vitro-selected RNAs that bind to conditionally fluorescent small molecules and enhance their fluorescence. Upon binding TO1-biotin, the iMango-III aptamer achieves the largest fluorescence enhancement reported for turn-on aptamers (over 5000-fold). This aptamer was generated by structure-guided engineering and functional reselection of the parental aptamer Mango-III. Structures of both Mango-III and iMango-III have previously been determined by conventional cryocrystallography using synchrotron X-radiation. Using an X-ray free-electron laser (XFEL), the room-temperature iMango-III–TO1-biotin co-crystal structure has now been determined at 3.0 Å resolution. This structural model, which was refined against a data set of ∼1300 diffraction images (each from a single crystal), is largely consistent with the structures determined from single-crystal data sets collected at 100 K. This constitutes a technical benchmark on the way to XFEL pump–probe experiments on fluorescent RNA–small molecule complexes.

scholarly journals Pink-beam serial femtosecond crystallography for accurate structure-factor determination at an X-ray free-electron laser

IUCrJ ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 8 (6) ◽  
Author(s):  
Karol Nass ◽  
Camila Bacellar ◽  
Claudio Cirelli ◽  
Florian Dworkowski ◽  
Yaroslav Gevorkov ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Data Quality ◽  
Structure Determination ◽  
Structure Factor ◽  
Free Electron ◽  
Free Electron Laser ◽  
De Novo ◽  
Similar Data ◽  
X Ray ◽  
Redundant Data ◽  
Serial Femtosecond Crystallography

Serial femtosecond crystallography (SFX) at X-ray free-electron lasers (XFELs) enables essentially radiation-damage-free macromolecular structure determination using microcrystals that are too small for synchrotron studies. However, SFX experiments often require large amounts of sample in order to collect highly redundant data where some of the many stochastic errors can be averaged out to determine accurate structure-factor amplitudes. In this work, the capability of the Swiss X-ray free-electron laser (SwissFEL) was used to generate large-bandwidth X-ray pulses [Δλ/λ = 2.2% full width at half-maximum (FWHM)], which were applied in SFX with the aim of improving the partiality of Bragg spots and thus decreasing sample consumption while maintaining the data quality. Sensitive data-quality indicators such as anomalous signal from native thaumatin micro-crystals and de novo phasing results were used to quantify the benefits of using pink X-ray pulses to obtain accurate structure-factor amplitudes. Compared with data measured using the same setup but using X-ray pulses with typical quasi-monochromatic XFEL bandwidth (Δλ/λ = 0.17% FWHM), up to fourfold reduction in the number of indexed diffraction patterns required to obtain similar data quality was achieved. This novel approach, pink-beam SFX, facilitates the yet underutilized de novo structure determination of challenging proteins at XFELs, thereby opening the door to more scientific breakthroughs.

scholarly journals Time-resolved serial femtosecond crystallography studies at an X-ray free electron laser reveals structural changes in bacteriorhodopsin

2018 ◽  
Vol 1859 ◽  
pp. e28
Author(s):  
Richard Neutze ◽  
Eriko Nango ◽  
Tomoyuki Tanaka ◽  
Takanori Nakane ◽  
So Iwata ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Free Electron ◽  
Free Electron Laser ◽  
Structural Changes ◽  
Time Resolved ◽  
X Ray ◽  
Serial Femtosecond Crystallography

scholarly journals Pump-Probe Time-Resolved Serial Femtosecond Crystallography at SACLA: Current Status and Data Collection Strategies

2019 ◽  
Vol 9 (24) ◽  
pp. 5505 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eriko Nango ◽  
Minoru Kubo ◽  
Kensuke Tono ◽  
So Iwata
Keyword(s):  
Data Collection ◽  
Free Electron ◽  
Free Electron Laser ◽  
Current Status ◽  
Optical Pump ◽  
Time Resolved ◽  
Pump Probe ◽  
X Ray ◽  
Collection Strategies ◽  
Serial Femtosecond Crystallography

Structural information on protein dynamics is a critical factor in fully understanding the protein functions. Pump-probe time-resolved serial femtosecond crystallography (TR-SFX) is a recently established technique for visualizing the structural changes or reactions in proteins that are at work with high spatial and temporal resolution. In the pump-probe method, protein microcrystals are continuously delivered from an injector and exposed to an X-ray free-electron laser (XFEL) pulse after a trigger to initiate a reaction, such as light, chemicals, temperature, and electric field, which affords the structural snapshots of intermediates that occur in the protein. We are in the process of developing the device and techniques for pump-probe TR-SFX while using XFEL produced at SPring-8 Angstrom Compact Free-Electron Laser (SACLA). In this paper, we described our current development details and data collection strategies for the optical pump X-ray probe TR-SFX experiment at SACLA and then reported the techniques of in crystallo TR spectroscopy, which is useful in clarifying the nature of reaction that takes place in crystals in advance.

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