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Nature Research, Nature Communications, 1(10), 2019

DOI: 10.1038/s41467-019-12955-3

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Membrane protein megahertz crystallography at the European XFEL

Journal article published in 2019 by Chris Gisriel ORCID, Jesse Coe, Romain Letrun ORCID, Oleksandr M. Yefanov, Cesar Luna-Chavez ORCID, Natasha E. Stander, Stella Lisova, Valerio Mariani, Manuela Kuhn, Steve Aplin, Thomas D. Grant ORCID, Katerina Dörner, Tokushi Sato, Austin Echelmeier ORCID, Jorvani Cruz Villarreal ORCID and other authors.
This paper is made freely available by the publisher.
This paper is made freely available by the publisher.

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Data provided by SHERPA/RoMEO

Abstract

AbstractThe world’s first superconducting megahertz repetition rate hard X-ray free-electron laser (XFEL), the European XFEL, began operation in 2017, featuring a unique pulse train structure with 886 ns between pulses. With its rapid pulse rate, the European XFEL may alleviate some of the increasing demand for XFEL beamtime, particularly for membrane protein serial femtosecond crystallography (SFX), leveraging orders-of-magnitude faster data collection. Here, we report the first membrane protein megahertz SFX experiment, where we determined a 2.9 Å-resolution SFX structure of the large membrane protein complex, Photosystem I, a > 1 MDa complex containing 36 protein subunits and 381 cofactors. We address challenges to megahertz SFX for membrane protein complexes, including growth of large quantities of crystals and the large molecular and unit cell size that influence data collection and analysis. The results imply that megahertz crystallography could have an important impact on structure determination of large protein complexes with XFELs.