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research papers
A technique is described for extracting information on the distance between the two components of a dumb-bell arrangement in a macromolecular complex from neutron low-Q scattering data. The technique is based on fitting the sine Fourier transform of a function that is constructed as the sum of third-order polynomials (B splines) with variable location, width and height in real space to the scattering data in reciprocal space. The usefulness of the method is demonstrated by model calculations and by its application to real data sets [protein-protein distances within the small (30S) and large (50S) subunits of ribosomes from the bacterium Escherichia coli].