Microscopic Water Droplet Beams for Protein Structure Determination
by
Bruce Doak, ASU Department of Physics, Arizona, USA
→
Europe/Berlin
Bldg. 25b, Room 109
Bldg. 25b, Room 109
Description
Recent advances in "lensless imaging" have unleashed tremendous efforts worldwide to develop serial x-ray diffraction into a tool for measuring the structure of large biological molecules without needing to crystallize a sample. Protein structure determination is a specific objective of large free-electron lasers now under construction in Germany and California. Critical to all such efforts is the ability to deliver biomolecules to a micron-sized spot into vacuum while maintaining the native conformation of the molecule. For water-soluble proteins, the ideal transport vehicle is a microscopic water droplet. This technique can be extended to the very important protein class of membrane proteins by encapsulating them in a lipid micelle. Our group at ASU is developing novel techniques to generate single-file streams of microscopic water droplets and to inject these into vacuum in a well-controlled fashion. This talk will discuss the physics, fluid dynamics technology, challenges, failures, successes, and promises of our research to date.
*Work performed with and by: Uwe Weierstall, Dan Deponte, Dmitri Starodub, Mark Hunter, Jared Warner, Jill Kennedy, Kevin Schmidt, Petra Fromme, and John Spence.
