Nanocrystallography measurements of early stage synthetic malaria pigment
Category
Published on
Type
journal-article
Author
Ruben A. Dilanian and Victor Streltsov and Hannah D. Coughlan and Harry M. Quiney and Andrew V. Martin and Nectarios Klonis and Con Dogovski and Sébastien Boutet and Marc Messerschmidt and Garth J. Williams and Sophie Williams and Nicholas W. Phillips and Keith A. Nugent and Leann Tilley and Brian Abbey
Citation
Dilanian, R.A. et al., 2017. Nanocrystallography measurements of early stage synthetic malaria pigment. Journal of Applied Crystallography, 50(5), pp.1533–1540. Available at: http://dx.doi.org/10.1107/s1600576717012663.
Abstract
The recent availability of extremely intense, femtosecond X-ray free-electron laser (XFEL) sources has spurred the development of serial femtosecond nanocrystallography (SFX). Here, SFX is used to analyze nanoscale crystals of β-hematin, the synthetic form of hemozoin which is a waste by-product of the malaria parasite. This analysis reveals significant differences in β-hematin data collected during SFX and synchrotron crystallography experiments. To interpret these differences two possibilities are considered: structural differences between the nanocrystal and larger crystalline forms of β-hematin, and radiation damage. Simulation studies show that structural inhomogeneity appears at present to provide a better fit to the experimental data. If confirmed, these observations will have implications for designing compounds that inhibit hemozoin formation and suggest that, for some systems at least, additional information may be gained by comparing structures obtained from nanocrystals and macroscopic crystals of the same molecule.
