PIER Photon Science Colloquium: Growing the best protein crystals ever?

by Elias Vlieg (Radboud University Nijmegen, The Netherlands)

Friday 13 Jun 2014, 14:00 → 15:00 Europe/Berlin

CFEL, Bldg. 99 (DESY Hamburg)

The growth of high quality single protein crystals, yielding the highest X-ray resolution, remains a bottleneck in macromolecular crystallography. Convection-free conditions should lead to improved crystal quality, because in this case growth is slow and the formation of defects and the incorporation of impurities minimized. Convection-free conditions have been achieved in the microgravity environment of space, but the impact on protein crystal growth has been limited due to the experimental difficulties with this method. We developed an efficient convection-free environment using an upside-down geometry, where crystals grow at the ‘ceiling’ of a growth cell. For three different systems we found that the ‘ceiling crystals’ give X-ray resolutions better than current world records, even when using solutions of moderate purity.