Importance of Determination of Crystal Quality in Protein Crystals when Performing High-Resolution Structural Analysis

Abstract

We show that the extinction effect explained by the dynamical theory of diffraction must be considered even in the case of protein crystals. Equal-thickness fringes, which are attributed to the Pendellösung effect, were clearly observed in the region of a tapered glucose isomerase crystal with wedge-like edges using X-ray topography carried out with a beam of monochromatic synchrotron radiation. This indicates that the perfection of this glucose isomerase crystal is high enough to produce this dynamical theory-related effect: this surely leads to difficulty in the collection of accurate integrated intensities of diffraction spots for X-ray structural analysis. Therefore, it is important to determine whether the crystal quality of a protein crystal under analysis is adequate to obtain accurate three-dimensional structures of protein molecules for X-ray structural analyses. We show that X-ray diffraction rocking-curve measurements can provide clues for this determination.