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Acta Cryst. (2014). A70, C341
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The data collection parameters used in a diffraction experiment have a strong impact on the quality of the acquired data. A careful choice of parameters leads to better data and can make the difference between success and failure in phasing attempts and better data will also result in a more accurate atomic model. The selection of data acquisition parameters has to account for the application of the data in various phasing methods or high-resolution refinement. Furthermore, experimental factors like crystal characteristics and the properties of X-ray source and detector have to be considered. Hybrid Pixel Detectors are now for several years in use in macromolecular crystallography and an increasing number of synchrotron beamlines as well as laboratory instruments are equipped with such detectors. Photon-counting Hybrid Pixel Detectors have fundamentally different characteristics and offer various advantages over other detector technologies. To fully exploit the advantages of Hybrid Pixel Detectors, different data collection strategies than those established for other detector types have to be applied. Fine φ-slicing is a strategy particularly well suited because of the fast readout time and the absence of readout noise. This strategy was systematically investigated collecting a large number of data sets from crystals of four different proteins to investigate the benefit of fine φ-slicing on data quality with a noise-free detector in practice. The results show that fine φ-slicing can substantially improve scaling statistics and anomalous signal. Furthermore, when collecting data in continuous rotation at high frame rates up to hundreds of images per second, quality might be impaired by detector readout. Results on the influence of readout time on data quality will be presented and strategies to easily avoid detrimental effects of detector readout will be discussed.

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Acta Cryst. (2014). A70, C1067
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Electron crystallography has the unique advantage of visualizing membrane proteins in a native-like lipid environment, which likely favors the native conformation. In addition, it allows for the protein to undergo conformational changes in response to their activating signals. We used 2D crystals of channelrhodopsin-2, a cation-selective light-gated channel from Chlamydomonas reinhardtii (Nagel et al., 2003) to study light-induced conformational changes of this intriguing channel, which is currently a powerful tool in optogenetics. Therefore, 2D crystals of the slow photocycling C128T ChR2 mutant were exposed to 473 nm light and rapidly frozen to trap the open state. Projection difference maps at 6 Å resolution show the location, extent and direction of light-induced conformational changes in ChR2 during the transition from the closed state to the ion-conducting open state. Difference peaks indicate that transmembrane helices (TMHs) 2, 6, and 7 reorient or rearrange during the photocycle. No major differences were found near TMH3 and 4 at the dimer interface. While conformational changes in TMH6 and 7 are known from other microbial-type rhodopsins, our results indicate that TMH2 has a key role in light-induced channel opening and closing in ChR2.
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