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Updated: Aug 3, 2025

Microcrystallography of Protein Crystals and In Cellulo Diffraction
Published on: July 21, 2017
Inter-Bragg crystallographic phase retrieval from shape transforms, stacking faults and substitutional disorder
J P J Chen1, K Pande2, J J Donatelli2
1Department of Physics, Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ 85287, USA; Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Canterbury, Christchurch 8041, New Zealand.
Abstract:
One of the brilliant ideas of John Spence when he saw the first diffraction patterns from the Linac Coherent Light Source was that one could solve the crystallographic phase problem by utilising the intensities between Bragg peaks. Because these intensities are due to the Fourier transform of the shape of the crystal, the approach came to be known as "shape-transform phasing." Shape-transform phasing was developed over the next ten years and formed the basis for many other interesting ideas and pursuits. Here we describe the current best implementation of the original idea using a lattice occupancy formalism and show that certain types of crystal defects can also be modelled via this approach, allowing the molecular structure to be recovered from the additional information offered by the inter-Bragg intensities from these crystal defects.
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