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Updated: Dec 27, 2025

Neutron Crystallography Data Collection and Processing for Modelling Hydrogen Atoms in Protein Structures
Published on: December 1, 2020
Dynamic nuclear polarization enhanced neutron crystallography: Amplifying hydrogen in biological crystals
Joshua Pierce1, Matthew J Cuneo1, Anna Jennings2
1Neutron Scattering Division, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Oak Ridge, TN, United States.
Abstract:
Dynamic nuclear polarization (DNP) can provide a powerful means to amplify neutron diffraction from biological crystals by 10-100-fold, while simultaneously enhancing the visibility of hydrogen by an order of magnitude. Polarizing the neutron beam and aligning the proton spins in a polarized sample modulates the coherent and incoherent neutron scattering cross-sections of hydrogen, in ideal cases amplifying the coherent scattering by almost an order of magnitude and suppressing the incoherent background to zero. This chapter describes current efforts to develop and apply DNP techniques for spin polarized neutron protein crystallography, highlighting concepts, experimental design, labeling strategies and recent results, as well as considering new strategies for data collection and analysis that these techniques could enable.
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