Dear Tanya, We have published a paper related to this topics on PloS One last year (see below), and we have not generally encountered "crystal degradation pattern upon X-ray exposure".
"Get phases from arsenic anomalous scattering: de novo SAD phasing of two protein structures crystallized in cacodylate buffer." Liu X, Zhang H, Wang XJ, Li LF, Su XD. PLoS One. 2011;6(9):e24227. Epub 2011 Sep 2. Xiao-Dong Su, Professor Chairman of the Commission on Biological Macromolecules (CBM), International Union of Crystallography (IUCr); Secretary-general, Chinese Crystallographic Society(CCrS); School of Life Sciences, Peking University 100871 Beijing, China Phone: +86-10-62759743 FAX: +86-10-62765669 E-mail: [email protected] ----- 原始邮件 ----- 发件人: Tatyana Sysoeva <[email protected]> 收件人: [email protected] 已发送邮件: Mon, 30 Jul 2012 06:53:13 +0800 (CST) 主题: [ccp4bb] asking for a reference for cacodylate decomposition in protein crystals upon X-ray exposure Hi! I heard a couple of times that use of cacodylate buffers in crystallization is bad, and not only because of the compound toxicity. As I understood, presence of the cacodylate in a protein crystal will cause a particular crystal degradation pattern upon X-ray exposure - "darkening of the crystals, gas formation" I tried to find some references on that and failed in doing so. I found some earlier discussions like this one: http://www.proteincrystallography.org/ccp4bb/message23691.html but don't have anything to reference in literature. I would appreciate if someone can point me to a right direction. I am sorry if this question is out of the groups topic range. Thank you in advance! Sincerely, Tanya
