Co-flow injection for serial crystallography at X-ray free-electron lasers
Category
Published on
Type
journal-article
Author
Diandra Doppler and Mohammad T. Rabbani and Romain Letrun and Jorvani Cruz Villarreal and Dai Hyun Kim and Sahir Gandhi and Ana Egatz-Gomez and Mukul Sonker and Joe Chen and Faisal H. M. Koua and Jayhow Yang and Mohamed Youssef and Victoria Mazalova and Saša Bajt and Megan L. Shelby and Matt A. Coleman and Max O. Wiedorn and Juraj Knoska and Silvan Schön and Tokushi Sato and Mark S. Hunter and Ahmad Hosseinizadeh and Christopher Kuptiz and Reza Nazari and Roberto C. Alvarez and Konstantinos Karpos and Sahba Zaare and Zachary Dobson and Erin Discianno and Shangji Zhang and James D. Zook and Johan Bielecki and Raphael de Wijn and Adam R. Round and Patrik Vagovic and Marco Kloos and Mohammad Vakili and Gihan K. Ketawala and Natasha E. Stander and Tien L. Olson and Katherine Morin and Jyotirmory Mondal and Jonathan Nguyen and José Domingo Meza-Aguilar and Gerdenis Kodis and Sara Vaiana and Jose M. Martin-Garcia and Valerio Mariani and Peter Schwander and Marius Schmidt and Marc Messerschmidt and Abbas Ourmazd and Nadia Zatsepin and Uwe Weierstall and Barry D. Bruce and Adrian P. Mancuso and Thomas Grant and Anton Barty and Henry N. Chapman and Matthias Frank and Raimund Fromme and John C. H. Spence and Sabine Botha and Petra Fromme and Richard A. Kirian and Alexandra Ros
Citation
Doppler, D. et al., 2022. Co-flow injection for serial crystallography at X-ray free-electron lasers. Journal of Applied Crystallography, 55(1). Available at: http://dx.doi.org/10.1107/s1600576721011079.
Abstract
Serial femtosecond crystallography (SFX) is a powerful technique that exploits X-ray free-electron lasers to determine the structure of macromolecules at room temperature. Despite the impressive exposition of structural details with this novel crystallographic approach, the methods currently available to introduce crystals into the path of the X-ray beam sometimes exhibit serious drawbacks. Samples requiring liquid injection of crystal slurries consume large quantities of crystals (at times up to a gram of protein per data set), may not be compatible with vacuum configurations on beamlines or provide a high background due to additional sheathing liquids present during the injection. Proposed and characterized here is the use of an immiscible inert oil phase to supplement the flow of sample in a hybrid microfluidic 3D-printed co-flow device. Co-flow generation is reported with sample and oil phases flowing in parallel, resulting in stable injection conditions for two different resin materials experimentally. A numerical model is presented that adequately predicts these flow-rate conditions. The co-flow generating devices reduce crystal clogging effects, have the potential to conserve protein crystal samples up to 95% and will allow degradation-free light-induced time-resolved SFX.
DOI
Funding
NSF-STC Biology with X-ray Lasers (NSF-1231306)