Abstract
For many years, diffraction experiments in macromolecular crystallography at X-ray wavelengths longer than that of Cu-K α (1.54 Å) have been largely underappreciated. Effects caused by increased X-ray absorption result in the fact that these experiments are more difficult than the standard diffraction experiments at short wavelengths. However, due to the also increased anomalous scattering of many biologically relevant atoms, important additional structural information can be obtained. This information, in turn, can be used for phase determination, for substructure identification, in molecular replacement approaches, as well as in structure refinement. This chapter reviews the possibilities and the difficulties associated with such experiments, and it provides a short description of two macromolecular crystallography synchrotron beam lines dedicated to long-wavelength X-ray diffraction experiments.
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Acknowledgements
I would like to thank all of my friends and colleagues who have worked with me in this exciting field of longer-wavelength MX over many years and contributed many of the ideas and hypotheses presented in this chapter. I would also like to thank Rachel Kramer Green from the PDB for providing the statistics on the wavelength data in the PDB entries.
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Weiss, M.S. (2017). Long-Wavelength X-Ray Diffraction and Its Applications in Macromolecular Crystallography. In: Wlodawer, A., Dauter, Z., Jaskolski, M. (eds) Protein Crystallography. Methods in Molecular Biology, vol 1607. Humana Press, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4939-7000-1_17
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