X-ray crystal structure analysis of magnetically oriented microcrystals of lysozyme at 1.8 Å resolution
Tsukui S., Kimura F., Garman EF., Baba S., Mizuno N., Mikami B., Kimura T.
© 2016 International Union of Crystallography. Microcrystals of lysozyme (5-10 μm) suspended in an ultraviolet-light-curable resin were aligned three dimensionally under a non-uniformly rotating magnetic field, and then the resin was consolidated by photopolymerization to obtain a composite in which microcrystals were three-dimensionally aligned. The obtained composite (MOMA: magnetically oriented microcrystal array) was analysed using a synchrotron X-ray source. A resolution of 1.8 Å was obtained, which is in marked contrast to the resolution of 3 Å previously reported for these composites, obtained by using an in-house X-ray diffractometer. These results show that a combination of MOMAs with conventional synchrotron beamlines may have valuable potential for crystal analyses of protein crystals that do not grow to larger sizes.