Improving Protein Crystal Quality via Mechanical Vibration

Abstract

Growing high quality protein crystals enables higher quality high-resolution structure determination by X-ray diffraction. In this paper, we show that mechanical vibration could be an effective and useful tool for improving protein crystal quality. The crystal quality of the selected proteins was examined using X-ray diffraction. The quality comparison of the crystals grown with and without vibration verified that mechanical vibration not only enhanced the morphology of the crystals but also improved the crystal quality. Therefore, we propose that mechanical vibration could be a useful alternative tool for obtaining high quality-diffracting protein crystals.