The experiment places a fiber in the trajectory of an X-ray beam at right angle. Sauter and colleagues have developed a new technique, called small-molecule serial femtosecond X-ray crystallography (or smSFX), which can overcome the powder problem. Rosalind Franklin used this technique in discovering structural information of DNA. X-ray diffraction, phenomenon in which the atoms of a crystal, by virtue of their uniform spacing, cause an interference pattern of the waves present in an incident beam of X-rays. These granules are sometimes called “microcrystals”. “Most substances form powders composed of small granules, whose X-ray diffraction patterns are harder to disentangle,” says Nicholas Sauter, a computer senior scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, US. This means that it’s much harder to learn about the many, many substances that don’t crystallise easily. Without molecules sitting in large, ordered structures like crystals, the X-ray data is too chaotic to interpret. William Thomas Astbury, a crystallographer working at the University of Leeds in Leeds, England, gathered the first diffraction patterns of DNA in 1937. It was Rosalind Franklin’s X-ray photos of pure DNA crystals that led to the discovery of their structure, for instance.īut X-ray crystallography, as you might expect, needs crystals to work. Scientists began collecting X-ray diffraction patterns of DNA in the 1930s before they confirmed that DNA contained genes. It’s a powerful technique for learning about molecules of all shapes and sizes, and has been particularly useful for learning about proteins and other biomolecules. X-ray crystallography, as the name implies, involves firing X-rays at crystals of a substance to find out how its atoms are arranged. Their technique is described in a paper in Nature. Taken in 1952, this image is the first X-ray picture of DNA, which led to the discovery of its molecular structure by Watson and Crick. And a team of US scientists have just found a way to make it even more effective. Use of X-ray crstallography to prove that DNA. Maurice Wilkins obtained some of the first X-ray diffraction patterns of DNA from which dimensions could be calculated. How do we know that DNA is a double helix, or that coronavirus spike proteins are spike-shaped? One technique – X-ray crystallography – can take a lot of the credit. Rosalind Franklin and Raymond Gosling obtained this X-ray diffraction pattern, which triggered the idea that DNA was a helix.
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