TY - JOUR AU - Ayyer, Kartik AU - Yefanov, Oleksandr AU - Oberthür, Dominik AU - Roy-Chowdhury, Shatabdi AU - Galli, Lorenzo AU - Mariani, Valerio AU - Basu, Shibom AU - Coe, Jesse AU - Conrad, Chelsie E. AU - Fromme, Raimund AU - Schaffer, Alexander AU - Dörner, Katerina AU - James, Daniel AU - Kupitz, Christopher AU - Metz, Markus AU - Nelson, Garrett AU - Paulraj, Lourdu Xavier AU - Beyerlein, Kenneth AU - Schmidt, Marius AU - Sarrou, Iosifina AU - Spence, John C. H. AU - Weierstall, Uwe AU - White, Thomas AU - Yang, Jay-How AU - Zhao, Yun AU - Liang, Mengning AU - Aquila, Andrew AU - Hunter, Mark S. AU - Robinson, Joseph S. AU - Koglin, Jason E. AU - Boutet, Sébastien AU - Fromme, Petra AU - Barty, Anton AU - Chapman, Henry N. TI - Macromolecular diffractive imaging using imperfect crystals JO - Nature VL - 530 IS - 7589 SN - 0028-0836 CY - London [u.a.] PB - Nature Publ. Group M1 - PUBDB-2016-01028 SP - 202 - 206 PY - 2016 N1 - (c) Macmillan Publishers Limited AB - The three-dimensional structures of macromolecules and their complexes are mainly elucidated by X-ray protein crystallography. A major limitation of this method is access to high-quality crystals, which is necessary to ensure X-ray diffraction extends to sufficiently large scattering angles and hence yields information of sufficiently high resolution with which to solve the crystal structure. The observation that crystals with reduced unit-cell volumes and tighter macromolecular packing often produce higher-resolution Bragg peaks suggests that crystallographic resolution for some macromolecules may be limited not by their heterogeneity, but by a deviation of strict positional ordering of the crystalline lattice. Such displacements of molecules from the ideal lattice give rise to a continuous diffraction pattern that is equal to the incoherent sum of diffraction from rigid individual molecular complexes aligned along several discrete crystallographic orientations and that, consequently, contains more information than Bragg peaks alone. Although such continuous diffraction patterns have long been observed—and are of interest as a source of information about the dynamics of proteins—they have not been used for structure determination. Here we show for crystals of the integral membrane protein complex photosystem II that lattice disorder increases the information content and the resolution of the diffraction pattern well beyond the 4.5 \mathringA limit of measurable Bragg peaks, which allows us to phase the pattern directly. Using the molecular envelope conventionally determined at 4.5 \mathringA as a constraint, we obtain a static image of the photosystem II dimer at a resolution of 3.5 \mathringA. This result shows that continuous diffraction can be used to overcome what have long been supposed to be the resolution limits of macromolecular crystallography, using a method that exploits commonly encountered imperfect crystals and enables model-free phasing. LB - PUB:(DE-HGF)16 UR - <Go to ISI:>//WOS:000369916700035 C6 - pmid:26863980 DO - DOI:10.1038/nature16949 UR - https://bib-pubdb1.desy.de/record/294153 ER -