Dynamic Neutron Scattering by Biological Systems

Abstract

Dynamic neutron scattering directly probes motions in biological systems on femtosecond to microsecond timescales. When combined with molecular dynamics simulation and normal mode analysis, detailed descriptions of the forms and frequencies of motions can be derived. We examine vibrations in proteins, the temperature dependence of protein motions, and concepts describing the rich variety of motions detectable using neutrons in biological systems at physiological temperatures. New techniques for deriving information on collective motions using coherent scattering are also reviewed.

Dynamics of proteins in solution

“…Inelastic scattering is however not in the focus of this review, and therefore related studies will not be reviewed. For further information on this topic we refer the reader to Smith et al (2018).…”

“…The interpretation of experimental data with the help of MD simulations has evolved into a very large field (e.g. Smith, 1991;Daniel et al, 2003;Sakai and Arbe, 2009;Smith et al, 2018) beyond the scope of this review. The comparison of results from simulated atom trajectories with experimental scattering functions has been achieved using software packages such as nMOLDYN (Kneller et al, 1995;Róg et al, 2003) or MDANSE (Goret et al, 2017).…”

A Quantitative Comparison of the Counting Significance of van Hove Integral Spectroscopy and Quasielastic Neutron Scattering

“…An alternative approach that has been proposed a number of times is to measure the "elastic" scattering to get some (overall) measure of the system dynamics [17][18][19][20][21][22][23][24][25][26][27][28][29][30][31] . We recently showed a new method based on elastic scattering, our method being unique in that it accesses I(t) directly 32 .…”

Dynamics from elastic neutron-scattering via direct measurement of the running time-integral of the van Hove distribution function

“…For a fixed instrumental condition, Eq. 1 is the "elastic scattering", which has been routinely measured as a function of system parameters such as temperature, pressure, hydration, etc 13,[18][19][20][21][22][23][24][25][26] . In the present case however, we change the width of either the incident-beam, ħΔωR, or the filter, ħΔωF, by values that provide an incremental change in the observation time, tobs, that is inversely proportional to the varied N neutron (Q,ΔE = 0) = I(Q,t)R(t;ω R ,Δω R )F(t;ω R ,Δω F ) dt 0 ∞ ∫ (and broader) energy-width, i.e.…”