Protein crystallography with a micrometre-sized synchrotron-radiation beam

For the first time, protein microcrystallography has been performed with a focused synchrotron-radiation beam of 1 microm using a goniometer with a sub-micrometre sphere of confusion. The crystal structure of xylanase II has been determined with a flux density of about 3 x 10(10) photons s(-1) microm(-2) at the sample. Two sets of diffraction images collected from different sized crystals were shown to comprise data of good quality, which allowed a 1.5 A resolution xylanase II structure to be obtained. The main conclusion of this experiment is that a high-resolution diffraction pattern can be obtained from 20 microm(3) crystal volume, corresponding to about 2 x 10(8) unit cells. Despite the high irradiation dose in this case, it was possible to obtain an excellent high-resolution map and it could be concluded from the individual atomic B-factor patterns that there was no evidence of significant radiation damage. The photoelectron escape from a narrow diffraction channel is a possible reason for reduced radiation damage as indicated by Monte Carlo simulations. These results open many new opportunities in scanning protein microcrystallography and make random data collection from microcrystals a real possibility, therefore enabling structures to be solved from much smaller crystals than previously anticipated as long as the crystallites are well ordered.