Acoustic Injectors For Drop-On-Demand Serial Femtosecond Crystallography
Abstract
X-ray free-electron lasers (XFELs) provide very intense X-ray pulses suitable for macromolecular crystallography. Each X-ray pulse typically lasts for tens of femtoseconds and the interval between pulses is many orders of magnitude longer. Here we describe two novel acoustic injection systems that use focused sound waves to eject picoliter to nanoliter crystal-containing droplets out of microplates and into the X-ray pulse from which diffraction data are collected. The on-demand droplet delivery is synchronized to the XFEL pulse scheme, resulting in X-ray pulses intersecting up to 88% of the droplets. We tested several types of samples in a range of crystallization conditions, wherein the overall crystal hit ratio (e.g., fraction of images with observable diffraction patterns) is a function of the microcrystal slurry concentration. We report crystal structures from lysozyme, thermolysin, and stachydrine demethylase (Stc2). Additional samples were screened to demonstrate that these methods can be applied to rare samples.
Publication Date
4-5-2016
Publication Title
Structure
Volume
24
Issue
4
Number of Pages
631-640
Document Type
Article
Personal Identifier
scopus
DOI Link
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.str.2016.02.007
Copyright Status
Unknown
Socpus ID
84961218624 (Scopus)
Source API URL
https://api.elsevier.com/content/abstract/scopus_id/84961218624
STARS Citation
Roessler, Christian G.; Agarwal, Rakhi; Allaire, Marc; Alonso-Mori, Roberto; and Andi, Babak, "Acoustic Injectors For Drop-On-Demand Serial Femtosecond Crystallography" (2016). Scopus Export 2015-2019. 3460.
https://stars.library.ucf.edu/scopus2015/3460