X-ray diffractometer XtalCheck-S

laboratory

The XtalCheck-S is a highly versatile and user-friendly goniometer-mountable x,y,z stage for serial screening of various types of solid samples in 96-well SBS format crystallization plates. Primarily designed for in-situ screening of protein crystals in their crystallization environment, the XtalCheck-S may also be used to quickly screen powder samples. Once the powder samples have each been secured in a dedicated well, crystallographers will use the data collection program, CrysAlisPro, the exact same way they would for single crystals: features such as point-and-click object selection and centering, screening of multiple objects in multiple wells one by one or queuing of a multitude of candidates for subsequent screening without user intervention operate identically regardless of the type of sample. At Rigaku, an experiment has successfully been performed whereby powder samples were set in dedicated wells which had been previously wetted with a very small amount of PARATONE® oil, to prevent powder from falling off when the plate was mounted vertically in front of the beam The powder grains remained still and stable in the wells, allowing all the time needed for screening multiple grains even with longer exposure times. Importantly, thanks to a telescopic sled, the detector was backed up as much as needed to ensure proper resolution of the Debye-Sherrer rings. Lastly, a partial data set was collected by allowing the plate to rotate by about 25° in the beam along omega. Images were automatically merged together by CrysAlisPro to generate a single scattering image, from which a 2D plot of I vs. 2θ was seamlessly created by CrysAlisPro