Towards an understanding of radiation damage in cryocooled macromolecular crystals

Interest in radiation damage is growing rapidly owing to the surge in macromolecular crystallography experiments carried out at modern brilliant synchrotron macromolecular crystallography beamlines. Work on the characterization of radiation damage in cryocooled protein crystals is starting to have some impact on our understanding of the problem and of how damage might be affecting both the process of structure solution and the actual structure obtained. A brief review of the most recent developments is given together with an assessment of the remaining problems. Although progress is being made, the understanding of radiation damage is far from complete. Methods for recognizing the damage and treating the data are being made available but they are still at an early stage of development.