Quantitative Analysis of Synchrotron Laue Diffraction Patterns in Macromolecular Crystallography

The reduction of X-ray diffraction data obtained by the Laue method to accurate integrated intensities is more complicated and much less familiar than the reduction of monochromatic data. Problems of data accuracy and completeness have hindered the wide use of the Laue technique in macromolecular crystallography. Its unique advantage, data-collection speed, has been exploited only in situations such as fast time-resolved crystallography, to which monochromatic techniques are not as well suited. This paper reviews the major problems in data reduction in the Laue technique and provides a unified solution to the problems in integration of both streaky and spatially overlapping spots and data scaling. This solution has been incorporated into a new Laue diffraction data-reduction software package, LaueView. Laue data sets from crystals of lysozyme and α-haemolysin have been processed to test this solution, and demonstrate that Laue data sets can be reduced to yield structure amplitudes of at the very least the same quality as the best monochromatic data sets in terms of both accuracy and completeness.