Crystals

Crystal Characterization

• Birefringence
• solvent content

Crystal Imperfections

• Diffuse Scattering
• Incommensurate Lattices
• Examples of diffraction patterns showing particular features

Crystal Growth

• Modifying the protein to crystallize better
• Crystallization screens and methods
• I have crystals, but are they salt?
• Conditions prone to salt crystallization
• Biophysical methods for evaluation of crystallization tendency
• Improving crystal quality
• Robots for crystallization setup
• Visualization of crystal growth
• Crystal mounting
• Robots for crystal mounting
• Robots for crystallization monitoring
• Crystal growth: Tips and Tricks
• Crystal growth: Protein-DNA complexes
• Biomolecular crystallization database
• Prediction of protein crystallizability: XtalPred
• crystallization of soluble proteins (see also Improving crystal quality)
• crystallization of membrane proteins (see also Improving crystal quality#Improving diffraction quality of membrane protein crystals)
• relative humidity calculations of salt/PEG solutions - can also be used to calculate equivalent/matching osmotic pressure: http://go.esrf.eu/RH

Crystal handling

• Cryo
• Sticky crystals
• Soaking with heavy atoms
• Microseeding

Data collection

• X-ray generators
• Detectors
• Synchrotrons
• Strategies
• Data quality
• Radiation damage
• some ways to calculate the radiation dose that a crystal has absorbed
• Comparison of home source and synchrotron properties
• Data collection: Tips and Tricks
• Storage of diffraction data

References

1. Wiener MC (2004) A pedestrian guide to membrane protein crystallization. Methods 34(3), 364-372.
2. Loll PJ (2003) Membrane protein structural biology: the high throughput challenge. J. Struct. Biol. 142(1), 144-153.
3. Methods and Results in Crystallization of Membrane Proteins Iwata S (Ed.), San Diego, CA: International University Line. (2003)
4. Macromolecular Crystallography Protocols, Volume 1: Preparation and Crystallization of Macromolecules. Doublie S (Ed.), Totowa, NJ: Humana Press. (2007)
5. Structural Biology of Membrane Proteins. Grisshammer R, & Buchanan SK (Eds.), Cambridge, UK: Royal Society of Chemistry. (2006)
6. Macromolecular Crystallisation and Crystal Perfection. N E Chayen, J R Helliwell and E H Snell OUP 2010 [1]