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Tiny crystals have big potential for determining structures of small molecules

A method called microcrystal electron diffraction can rapidly image the structures of small molecules, including those found in mixtures. Will it usurp X-ray crystallography for determining small-molecule structures?
  1. Alan Brown

    1. Alan Brown is in the Department of Biological Chemistry and Molecular Pharmacology, Harvard Medical School, Boston, Massachusetts 02115, USA.

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  2. Jon Clardy

    1. Jon Clardy is in the Department of Biological Chemistry and Molecular Pharmacology, Harvard Medical School, Boston, Massachusetts 02115, USA.

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For decades, X-ray crystallography has been the gold-standard method for determining the structures of small molecules. But two papers, one by Gruene et al.1 in Angewandte Chemie and the other by Jones et al.2 in ACS Central Science, illustrate the potential of using an electron cryomicroscopy (cryo-EM) method called microcrystal electron diffraction (MicroED) for this purpose. Using different laboratory set-ups, the two groups have produced strikingly concordant sets of results: high-resolution structures of a suite of small molecules, some of which were even solved from impure samples.

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Nature 564, 348-349 (2018)

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-018-07756-5

References

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