Acta Crystallographica Section D

Biological Crystallography

Volume 62, Part 8 (August 2006)


research papers



Acta Cryst. (2006). D62, 897-900    [ doi:10.1107/S0907444906012704 ]

Recent advances in direct phasing methods for heavy-atom substructure determination

H. Xu and H. A. Hauptman

Abstract: Macromolecular crystal structure determination has typically been a two-step process. When diffraction data from multiple chemically isomorphous or anomalously scattering crystals are available, the positions of heavy atoms from amplitude differences arising from native-derivative crystal pairs or an anomalously scattering crystal are first located and phasing of the whole protein structure is then completed using the heavy-atom substructure as a bootstrap. Shake-and-Bake, a direct-methods-based dual-space refinement procedure, provides heavy-atom substructure solutions by finding the constrained global minimum of a probabilistically defined minimal function. This minimal function relies on probabilistic estimates of the cosines of the structure invariants. A novel statistically defined minimal function that utilizes the statistical properties of the structure invariants has recently been proposed and tested. Applications of the statistical Shake-and-Bake procedure show that statistical direct methods provide a simple, reliable and efficient method of heavy-atom substructure determination.

Keywords: direct phasing; heavy-atom substructures.

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