Perhaps the new concept of one “frame” for a crystal should be a complete 3D 
sampling of reciprocal space, and then averaging can be done after the fact to 
improve statistics.

JPK


From: CCP4 bulletin board [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Graeme 
Winter
Sent: Thursday, May 01, 2014 3:26 AM
To: [email protected]
Subject: Re: [ccp4bb] Pilatus and Strategy wrt Radiation Damage

Hi All,

A major opportunity with Pilatus detectors is the chance to redistribute the 
dose in reciprocal space i.e. measure a lot more data, with less dose / frame, 
then decide in hindsight where you probably should have cut off the data set.

It is certainly true that "strategies" such as 0.2 s/0.2 degree (I would call 
this a tactic myself ;oD) seem to work well, and that it often seems that you 
need a reasonable dose to be able to process the data properly (see below). I 
would however agree strongly that unless you are not vulnerable to radiation 
damage the use of a strategy program such as EDNA is critical as continuous 
readout of a fast detector can let you kill your sample really quickly... and 
it would be a shame to measure the wrong part of reciprocal space.

Also the 0.2s / 0.2 degree rate is very beamline dependent. Here at Diamond it 
is certainly routine to measure data with 0.05 s / 0.1 degree exposure times 
with Pilatus2 and end up with very good data, and the latest Pilatus3 machines 
can run with 0.01s exposure times. As Nukri said earlier, once you start 
running at these very high rates you become much more sensitive to beamline and 
source characteristics, so your mileage may vary and so on. It's certainly 
worth spending some time exploring the capability and what works well for 
*your* samples. I would however strongly agree with the recommendations for 
fine slicing, and avoid e.g. 1 degree images.

In terms of "a reasonable dose to process the data properly" there are some 
major challenges when dealing with exceedingly weak data in measuring the 
reflections at high resolution well: the statistics start to become poorly 
behaved with current analysis software. One tactic I have been playing with is 
to record the same wedge of data (for example from an EDNA strategy) with 
exceedingly low dose perhaps 20 times, then to process this and look for signs 
of radiation damage. After arbitrarily deciding which "pass" radiation damage 
kicked in at then *sum* the *raw images* from each pass up to this point e.g.

pass_1_0001.cbf + pass_2_0001.cbf + .... pass_N_0001.cbf => sum_0001.cbf

Then process these summed images as if this was the original data. Funnily 
enough you may get better data than processing pass_1 to pass_N separately and 
then scaling and merging all of the measurements, which leads me to pointing 
the pointy finger of blame at the behaviour of the statistics, and that 
statistics and things like background subtraction become hard when you have 
very sparse data.

This summing process may seem like manipulating your raw data (naughty!!) but 
in essence it is really just performing the same process as when you recorded 
multiple exposures / passes on a single CCD image. It also has the happy side 
effect of averaging out any random / high frequency effects induced from source 
/ beamline effects, but will also average in any radiation damage effects as 
well! This by the way is what I was getting at with redistributing your dose in 
reciprocal space...

Cheerio, Graeme



On 30 April 2014 17:41, Harry Powell 
<[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
Hi

Marcus Mueller (from Dectris, who develop and manufacture the Pilatus) did some 
work on this a couple of years ago and determined that an oscillation angle ~ 
0.5x the mosaicity of the crystal (using the XDS value of mosaicity, which is 
not the same as Mosflm's); the abstract says -
The results show that fine ’-slicing can substantially improve scaling 
statistics and anomalous signal provided that the rotation angle is comparable 
to half the crystal mosaicity.


Acta Cryst. (2012). D68, 42-56    [ doi:10.1107/S0907444911049833 ]
Optimal fine

-slicing for single-photon-counting pixel detectors

M. Mueller, M. Wang and C. Schulze-Briese

My reading of this is that there is still a place for strategy calculations.



On 30 Apr 2014, at Wed30 Apr 15:06, Sanishvili, Ruslan wrote:
Hi Jacob,

I'll take a first crack as I am sure many will follow.
It is true that with CCD detectors one has to be careful how small an 
oscillation range to use for a frame before read noise starts to eat into the 
data quality.
Pilatus offers two major new features - is fast and is photon counting as 
opposed to integrating detector.
The speed allows to collect data without a shutter and it is very important as 
it can dramatically improve data quality. Now there are fast CCD detectors as 
well on the market.
Being a photon counter, Pilatus has no "read" noise which, as you have pointed 
out, allows you to collect as thin a frame as you want. However, it is if you 
consider the detector only. In reality, if you go very thin and very fast, you 
may not have enough flux to record the data. Also, even once we get rid of the 
shutter, there are still other sources of instabilities and they do affect the 
fast data collection adversely. One could try going (very) thin sliced and 
somewhat slow but there is another gotcha there. Most rotation stages used for 
rotating the sample crystal, do not like going extremely slow which would be 
the case with thin frames and long exposure times. In this case the speed may 
not remain as constant as we would like during data collection.
I think there was a publication from Diamond Synchrotron discussing strategies 
of data collection with Pilatus.
We've done a little bit of systematic studies as well and while things may well 
be sample- and facility-dependent, ~0.2 degree frames with ~0.2 sec exposure 
time seemed to make good compromise between above-mentioned issues. Here I 
would like to emphasize again - there certainly will be samples which will 
benefit from somewhat different parameters.
Hope it helps,
Cheers,
N.

Ruslan Sanishvili (Nukri)
Macromolecular Crystallographer
GM/CA@APS
X-ray Science Division, ANL
9700 S. Cass Ave.
Lemont, IL 60439

Tel: (630)252-0665<tel:%28630%29252-0665>
Fax: (630)252-0667<tel:%28630%29252-0667>
[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>


________________________________________
From: CCP4 bulletin board [[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>] 
on behalf of Keller, Jacob 
[[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>]
Sent: Wednesday, April 30, 2014 7:49 AM
To: [email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>
Subject: [ccp4bb] Pilatus and Strategy wrt Radiation Damage

Dear Pilatus/Radiation Damage Cognoscenti,

I read a few years ago, before the advent of Pilatus detectors, that the best 
strategy was a sort of compromise between number of images and detector readout 
noise "overhead." I have heard that Pilatus detectors, however, have 
essentially no readout noise, so I am wondering whether strategies have changed 
in light of this, i.e., is the best practice now to collect as many images as 
possible at lowest exposure possible?

JPK

*******************************************
Jacob Pearson Keller, PhD
Looger Lab/HHMI Janelia Farms Research Campus
19700 Helix Dr, Ashburn, VA 20147
email: [email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>
*******************************************

Harry
--
** note change of address **
Dr Harry Powell, MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology, Francis Crick Avenue, 
Cambridge Biomedical Campus, Cambridge, CB2 0QH
Chairman of European Crystallographic Association SIG9 (Crystallographic 
Computing)





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