Synergistic use of serial and powder crystallography on proteins

This proposal focuses on the synergistic use of serial crystallography and powder diffraction for extracting domain size and strain estimates and phase weight estimates from microcrystalline protein powders. Serial diffraction images only record partial reflections and downstream processing requires a large number of independent observations per reflection to reliably converge and estimate the full reflection intensity. Parameters such as mosaic domain size and strain or co-existence of multiple crystalline phases further complicate processing. Here, we propose to use high resolution powder diffraction data for extracting domain size and strain distributions and feed those parameters back to serial data processing algorithms for more reliable merging and scaling from fewer diffraction images. Improvements in protein serial data processing could yield better electron density maps that would enable resolving finer structural details, which is crucial especially in time-resolved studies.