Experimental Advances for High-Speed Evaluation of Electron Densities

Evaluating electron densities of entire classes of chemically or biologically related compounds is within reach thanks to advances in high-speed high-resolution synchrotron diffraction: a 12 h sequence of diffraction experiments has been conducted at the beamline X10SA of the Swiss Light Source (SLS). It resulted in four high-resolution X-ray data sets used for experimental electron density determinations of the two halogenated fullerenes C60F18 and C60Cl30, the Watson and Crick base pair adenine-thymine and the tripeptide L-Ala-Gly-L-Ala. Application is considered relevant for life sciences where the study of structure-guided biological recognition processes can now be completed by electronic information of entire series of molecules.