microfluidic-chips-for-situ-crystal-x-ray-diffraction-situ-dynamic

Microfluidic Chips for <em>In Situ</em> Crystal X-ray Diffraction and <em>In Situ</em> Dynamic Light Scattering for Serial Crystallography

This protocol describes fabricating microfluidic devices with low X-ray background optimized for goniometer based fixed target serial crystallography. The ...

University of Hamburg

Many biochemical processes take place on timescales ranging from femto-seconds to seconds. Accordingly, any time-resolved experiment must be matched to the speed of the structural changes of interest. Therefore, the timescale of interest defines the requirements of the X-ray source, instrumentation and data-collection strategy. In this study, a minimalistic approach for  crystallization is presented that requires only a few microlitres of sample solution containing a few hundred crystals. It is demonstrated that complete diffraction data sets, merged from multiple crystals, can be recorded within only a few minutes of beamtime and allow high-resolution structural information of high quality to be obtained with a temporal resolution of 40 ms. Global and site-specific radiation damage can be avoided by limiting the maximal dose per crystal to 400 kGy. Moreover, analysis of the data collected at higher doses allows the time-resolved observation of site-specific radiation damage. Therefore, our approach is well suited to observe structural changes and possibly enzymatic reactions in the low-millisecond regime.

Svetlana Kapis

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