Performance of the new biological small- and wide-angle X-ray scattering beamline 13A at the Taiwan Photon Source
O. Shih, K.-F. Liao, Y.-Q. Yeh, C.-J. Su, C.-A. Wang, J.-W. Chang, W.-R. Wu, C.-C. Liang, C.-Y. Lin, T.-H. Lee, C.-H. Chang, L.-C. Chiang, C.-F. Chang, D.-G. Liu, M.-H. Lee, C.-Y. Liu, T.-W. Hsu, B. Mansel, M.-C. Ho, C.-Y. Shu, F. Lee, E. Yen, T.-C. Lin, U. Jeng
Abstract
Recent developments in the instrumentation and data analysis of synchrotron small-angle X-ray scattering (SAXS) on biomolecules in solution have made biological SAXS (BioSAXS) a mature and popular tool in structural biology. This article reports on an advanced endstation developed at beamline 13A of the 3.0 GeV Taiwan Photon Source for biological small- and wide-angle X-ray scattering (SAXS–WAXS or SWAXS). The endstation features an in-vacuum SWAXS detection system comprising two mobile area detectors (Eiger X 9M/1M) and an online size-exclusion chromatography system incorporating several optical probes including a UV–Vis absorption spectrometer and refractometer. The instrumentation and automation allow simultaneous SAXS–WAXS data collection and data reduction for high-throughput biomolecular conformation and composition determinations. The performance of the endstation is illustrated with the SWAXS data collected for several model proteins in solution, covering a scattering vector magnitude q across three orders of magnitude. The crystal-model fittings to the data in the q range ∼0.005–2.0 Å −1 indicate high similarity of the solution structures of the proteins to their crystalline forms, except for some subtle hydration-dependent local details. These results open up new horizons of SWAXS in studying correlated local and global structures of biomolecules in solution.