The 5th Winter School on Soft X-Rays in Macromolecular Crystallography

The aim of the School is to bring together experts and young scientists interested in exploiting the anomalous signal from light atoms (e.g. S, P, Ca, K, Mg) native to the protein or crystal for macromolecular structure determination using soft (wavelengths > 1.5Ã...) X-rays in order to help train the next generation of scientists in this maturing field. The 5th Winter School on Soft X-rays in Macromolecular Crystallography is a continuation of similar workshops held in Europe since 2003 as indicated:

1st Winter School:Â Bressanone/Brixen, Italy; Feb. 25-27, 2003

2nd Winter School: Seefeld, Austria; March 22-25, 2006

3rd Winter School:Â Berlin, Germany; February 18-20, 2009

4th Winter School:Â Grenoble, France, February 6-8, 2012

Topics Covered

SAD Theory & Historical Perspectives These lectures will address the theoretical aspects of overcoming the phase problem in using SAD and S-SAD data and highlight the historical perspectives of two initial de novo structures solved by S-SAD.

Source/Beamline Considerations These lectures and Case Studies will cover the optimization of the experiment setup in terms of the hardware, choice of wavelength and other source specific parameters.

Data Collection Strategies This lecture will cover techniques and problems associated with collecting sulfur-SAD data including crystal centering, data collection setup and methods used to increase the anomalous scattering signal to noise ratio in the data. The lecture will highlight common areas where problems can occur and suggest how best to eliminate them.

Data Reduction Theory and Strategies These lectures and Case Studies will focus on the data reduction process (indexing, integration and scaling) using several popular data reduction programs as examples, highlighting critical program input parameters and program output. The lecture will highlight common areas where problems can occur and suggest how best to eliminate them. New methods such as Multi-Crystal and Single Crystal Multi-dataset averaging will be described.

Anomalous Substructure Determination & Phasing This lecture and Case Study will describe the use of SHELXCDE [9] and HKL2MAP to determine the anomalous scattering substructure, the correct handedness of the anomalous scattering substructure, the generation of initial protein phases and interpreting the quality of the resulting electron density map.