No abstract

Experiments are described in which a direct comparison was made between a conventional 2 kW water‐cooled sealed‐tube X‐ray source and a 30 W air‐cooled microfocus source with focusing multilayer optics, using the same goniometer, detector, radiation (Mo Kα), crystals and software. The beam characteristics of the two sources were analyzed and the quality of the resulting data sets compared. The Incoatec Microfocus Source (IµS) gave a narrow approximately Gaussian‐shaped primary beam profile, whereas the Bruker AXS sealed‐tube source, equipped with a graphite monochromator and a monocapillary collimator, had a broader beam with an approximate intensity plateau. Both sources were mounted on the same Bruker D8 goniometer with a SMART APEX II CCD detector and Bruker Kryoflex low‐temperature device. Switching between sources simply required changing the software zero setting of the 2θ circle and could be performed in a few minutes, so it was possible to use the same crystal for both sources without changing its temperature or orientation. A representative cross section of compounds (organic, organometallic and salt) with and without heavy atoms was investigated. For each compound, two data sets, one from a small and one from a large crystal, were collected using each source. In another experiment, the data quality was compared for crystals of the same compound that had been chosen so that they had dimensions similar to the width of the beam. The data were processed and the structures refined using standard Bruker and SHELX software. The experiments show that the IµS gives superior data for small crystals whereas the diffracted intensities were comparable for the large crystals. Appropriate scaling is particularly important for the IµS data.

New and concise descriptors of the residual density are presented, namely the gross residual electrons, the net residual electrons and the fractal dimension distribution. These descriptors indicate how much residual density is present and in what way it is distributed, i.e. the extent to which the distribution is featureless. The amount of residual density present accounts for noise in the experimental data as well as for modeling inadequacies. Therefore, the minimization of the gross residual electrons during refinement serves as a quality criterion. In the case where only Gaussian noise is present in the residual density, the fractal distribution is parabolic in shape. Deviations from this shape therefore serve as an indicator for systematic errors. The new measures have been applied to simulated and experimental data in order to study the effects of noise, model inadequacies and truncation in the experimental resolution. These measures, although designed and examined with particular regard to applications of space residual density, are very general and can in principle also be applied to space and momentum residual densities in a one-, two-, three- or higher-dimensional Euclidean space.

It's hip to be square: The reaction of amidinato chlorosilylene (PhC(NtBu)2SiCl) with adamantyl phosphaalkyne and white phosphorus affords the formation of Si‐C‐Si‐P and Si‐P‐Si‐P (see picture) four‐membered rings. Both compounds were characterized by single‐crystal X‐ray studies and by solution and solid‐state NMR spectroscopy. DFT calculations elucidated the bonding situation.

We describe an algorithm for phasing protein crystal X-ray diffraction data that identifies, retrieves, refines and exploits general tertiary structural information from small fragments available in the Protein Data Bank. The algorithm successfully phased, through unspecific molecular replacement combined with density modification, all-helical, mixed alpha-beta, and all-beta protein structures. The method is available as a software implementation: Borges.