Yadav Maneesh K, Gerdts Cory J, Sanishvili Ruslan, Smith Ward W, Roach L Spencer, Ismagilov Rustem F, Kuhn Peter, Stevens Raymond C
The Scripps Research Institute, Department of Cell Biology, 10550 North Torrey Pines Road, La Jolla, CA 92037, USA.
J Appl Crystallogr. 2005 Dec;38(6):900-905. doi: 10.1107/S002188980502649X.
In situ X-ray data collection has the potential to eliminate the challenging task of mounting and cryocooling often fragile protein crystals, reducing a major bottleneck in the structure determination process. An apparatus used to grow protein crystals in capillaries and to compare the background X-ray scattering of the components, including thin-walled glass capillaries against Teflon, and various fluorocarbon oils against each other, is described. Using thaumatin as a test case at 1.8 Å resolution, this study demonstrates that high-resolution electron density maps and refined models can be obtained from in situ diffraction of crystals grown in microcapillaries.