1. Co-flow injection for serial crystallography at X-ray free-electron lasers
- Author
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Diandra Doppler, Mohammad T. Rabbani, Romain Letrun, Jorvani Cruz Villarreal, Dai Hyun Kim, Sahir Gandhi, Ana Egatz-Gomez, Mukul Sonker, Joe Chen, Faisal H. M. Koua, Jayhow Yang, Mohamed Youssef, Victoria Mazalova, Saša Bajt, Megan L. Shelby, Matt A. Coleman, Max O. Wiedorn, Juraj Knoska, Silvan Schön, Tokushi Sato, Mark S. Hunter, Ahmad Hosseinizadeh, Christopher Kuptiz, Reza Nazari, Roberto C. Alvarez, Konstantinos Karpos, Sahba Zaare, Zachary Dobson, Erin Discianno, Shangji Zhang, James D. Zook, Johan Bielecki, Raphael de Wijn, Adam R. Round, Patrik Vagovic, Marco Kloos, Mohammad Vakili, Gihan K. Ketawala, Natasha E. Stander, Tien L. Olson, Katherine Morin, Jyotirmory Mondal, Jonathan Nguyen, José Domingo Meza-Aguilar, Gerdenis Kodis, Sara Vaiana, Jose M. Martin-Garcia, Valerio Mariani, Peter Schwander, Marius Schmidt, Marc Messerschmidt, Abbas Ourmazd, Nadia Zatsepin, Uwe Weierstall, Barry D. Bruce, Adrian P. Mancuso, Thomas Grant, Anton Barty, Henry N. Chapman, Matthias Frank, Raimund Fromme, John C. H. Spence, Sabine Botha, Petra Fromme, Richard A. Kirian, and Alexandra Ros
- Subjects
0303 health sciences ,03 medical and health sciences ,02 engineering and technology ,021001 nanoscience & nanotechnology ,0210 nano-technology ,Research Papers ,General Biochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology ,030304 developmental biology - 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.
- Published
- 2022
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