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A powder X-ray diffractometer in motion. X-ray crystallography is the experimental science of determining the atomic and molecular structure of a crystal, in which the crystalline structure causes a beam of incident X-rays to diffract in specific directions.
In X-ray crystallography, a difference density map or Fo–Fc map shows the spatial distribution of the difference between the measured electron density of the crystal and the electron density explained by the current model. [1] A way to compute this map has been formulated for cryo-EM. [2]
The discovery of X-rays and electrons in the last decade of the 19th century enabled the determination of crystal structures on the atomic scale, which brought about the modern era of crystallography. The first X-ray diffraction experiment was conducted in 1912 by Max von Laue, [7] while electron diffraction was first realized in 1927 in the ...
The resulting map of the directions of the X-rays far from the sample is called a diffraction pattern. It is different from X-ray crystallography which exploits X-ray diffraction to determine the arrangement of atoms in materials, and also has other components such as ways to map from experimental diffraction measurements to the positions of atoms.
The name comes from the field of X-ray crystallography, where the phase problem has to be solved for the determination of a structure from diffraction data. [1] The phase problem is also met in the fields of imaging and signal processing. [2] Various approaches of phase retrieval have been developed over the years.
Inelastically scattered X-rays have intermediate phases and so in principle are not useful for X-ray crystallography. In practice X-rays with small energy transfers are included with the diffraction spots due to elastic scattering, and X-rays with large energy transfers contribute to the background noise in the diffraction pattern.
Single-wavelength anomalous diffraction (SAD) is a technique used in X-ray crystallography that facilitates the determination of the structure of proteins or other biological macromolecules by allowing the solution of the phase problem.
Isomorphous replacement (IR) is historically the most common approach to solving the phase problem in X-ray crystallography studies of proteins.For protein crystals this method is conducted by soaking the crystal of a sample to be analyzed with a heavy atom solution or co-crystallization with the heavy atom.