Seems to me you've got multiple lattices as well, esp visible in the upper left 
quadrant of the central tile.

JPK

From: CCP4 bulletin board [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Eugene 
Valkov
Sent: Monday, April 07, 2014 3:17 PM
To: [email protected]
Subject: Re: [ccp4bb] Continuing on the diffuse streak theme

Paul,
The fibre-like characteristics present in some diffraction patterns of nucleic 
acids, which I think you are referring to, is the contribution of the helical 
transform of the double-stranded helix. Essentially, the length of the regular 
spacings in the base pairs modulates the intensities of the Bragg reflections. 
These then do not decay smoothly as the function of resolution which results in 
intensities along the helical axes at 3.4A being quite strong whilst 
perpendicular ones are much weaker. I have observed this in the diffraction 
patterns of RNA crystals but I have not seen the diffuse streaking along 
lattice lines that you show.

One recent example of fibre-like diffraction of a nucleic acid is illustrated 
here:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B-wXJqcqFfUHUVpvZDhqREdqMzA/edit?usp=sharing
I do not think that what you are seeing in your crystals can be attributed 
solely to the above. The streaking between the spots is probably some sort of 
lattice anomaly. It would be interesting to hear if this had impacted in some 
way on phasing or refinement of the structure.
Eugene



On 7 April 2014 19:03, Paul Paukstelis 
<[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
Seeing the diffuse streaking threads that have cropped up recently got me to 
thinking about many of the DNA data sets we have collected on. We always see 
diffuse streaking along lattice lines.

See images:

http://vespa.chem.umd.edu/~paul/hex_streak01.png
http://vespa.chem.umd.edu/~paul/hex_streak02.png
http://vespa.chem.umd.edu/~paul/hex_streak03.png

My original interpretation of this as fiber diffraction from alignment of DNA 
bases came after reading Doucet et al. Nature 337, 190-192 and seeing that the 
streaks start at around 3.4A and orientation of the helical portions of the 
structure are perpendicular to the six-fold. I didn't really give it much more 
thought till seeing the threads about diffuse streaking. These show up even in 
crystals that diffract to higher resolution than the one shown in the images. I 
wonder if this is actually something else given that they are along lattice 
lines? Opinions?

--paul



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Dr Eugene Valkov

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Division of Structural Studies

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