A new blue-colored Imaging Plate: properties for X-ray recording in macromolecular crystallography

The properties of a new blue-colored Imaging Plate (IP), Fuji type UR-III, were examined with respect to spatial resolution and sensitivity to Cu Kα radiation. The spatial resolution of the new IP, estimated from the full width at half-maximum of the diffraction profile of a glutathione synthetase crystal, was 270 μm, smaller than that in a conventional IP, Fuji type BA (330 μm) and larger than that in an X-ray film, Kodak DEF-5 (210 μm). An estimation of the peak-to-background ratios of diffraction spots from a hen egg white lysozyme crystal shows that the new IP is at least 25 times more sensitive to Cu Kα radiation than the X-ray film. This new IP is a useful area detector to collect diffraction data from large-unit-cell crystals.