Crystal structure analysis multiple diffraction

New techniques for data analysis and improvements in instrumentation have now made it possible to carry out stmctural and conformational studies of biopolymers including proteins, polysaccharides, and nucleic acids. NMR, which may be done on noncrystalline materials in solution, provides a technique complementary to X-ray diffraction, which requires crystals for analysis. One-dimensional NMR, as described to this point, can offer structural data for smaller molecules. But proteins and other biopolymers with large numbers of protons will yield a very crowded spectrum with many overlapping lines. In multidimensional NMR (2-D, 3-D, 4-D), peaks are spread out through two or more axes to improve resolution. The techniques of correlation spectroscopy (COSY), nuclear Overhausser effect spectroscopy (NOESY), and transverse relaxation-optimized spectroscopy (TROSY) depend on the observation that nonequivalent protons interact with each other. By using multiple-pulse techniques, it is possible to perturb one nucleus and observe the effect on the spin states of other nuclei. The availability of powerful computers and Fourier transform (FT) calculations makes it possible to elucidate structures of proteins up to 40,000 daltons in molecular mass and there is future promise for studies on proteins over 100,000... 

In addition to reciprocal and direct space techniques considered in the previous sections, a large variety of approaches may be employed to create a model of the crystal structure in direct space. One of these, i.e. the geometrical method, has been implicitly employed in section 6.9, where the location of a single La atom in the unit cell was established from a simple analysis of the unit cell dimensions and from the availability of low multiplicity sites in the space group symmetry P6/mmm. Here we consider a more complex example, i.e. the solution of several crystal structures occurring in the series of Gd5(SixGei x)4 alloys. These examples illustrate the power of the powder diffraction method in detecting subtle details of the... 

In further comparing LEED and X-ray diffraction we recall that in X-ray diffraction one has ancillary information that is essential in structural analysis. One knows the density of the crystal, the chemical composition, the size of the unit cell and its symmetry. In LEED, comparable data are much more difficult to obtain. For example, the density of a surface structure is not measurable at all. The chemical composition after adsorption can often be inferred reliably from total gas exposure of a clean surface or from changes of symmetry of a LEED pattern, but it is never available as a separate datum. In X-ray diffraction, dimensions of the unit cell are easily found. In LEED, even the unit mesh size, as will be shown in Section IV, cannot in some cases be deduced with certainty. Multiple diffraction can sometimes cause beams which lead to a wrong assignment of unit mesh. 

The other subfamily, SLC1, includes the Na+-dependent glutamate transporters. It encompasses some amino- and carboxylic-acid transporters including glutamate transporters that are expressed in bacteria. X-ray diffraction data have been obtained from crystals of one of these [43] (Fig. 5-13). Analysis of multiple sequence alignments indicates that this molecule has a high degree of structural... 

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