What is it about?
Structure determination by crystallography is the basis for many fields in chemistry, pharmacology, and materials science. When the crystals have the size of powder grains, the atomic structure of the compounds inside a crystal can be determined using electron radiation. Due to technical restrictions of the crystal holder, electron cannot penetrate from the side of crystals. We suggest to simple ways to disturb the surface that holds the crystal so that the side of the crystals becomes accessible by the electrons. We demonstrate 100% data completeness with both solutions.
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Why is it important?
The interpretation of crystal diffraction data is very sensitive to sytematically missing data. Previously, 100% data completeness were seldomly reached. Some publications had to get away with 60-70% data completeness. This makes the structure look stretched out in one direction. From now on, fully complete data are available. This is a great boost in reliability of the data analysis.
Perspectives
The quality of atomic structures determined from electron diffraction lagged behind the quality of structures determined from X-ray diffraction, because even 5-10% of missing data introduce artefacts to the interpretation of the data. Our solutions are applicable to most crystalline samples so that electron diffraction is now equivalent to X-ray diffraction. This means an estimated three-fold increase to the number of compounds from which we can now determine their atomic structure.
Dr Tim Gruene
University of Vienna
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: 3D-structured supports create complete data sets for electron crystallography, Nature Communications, July 2019, Springer Science + Business Media,
DOI: 10.1038/s41467-019-11326-2.
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