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MLZ (eng)
Lichtenbergstr.1
85748 Garching
The monochromatic single crystal diffractometer BIODIFF is a joint project of the FRM II (TUM) and JCNS (Forschungszentrum Jülich).
BIODIFF is designed to handle crystals with large unit cells and is dedicated to the structure determination of biological macromolecules. In biological macromolecules, like proteins and nucleic acids, hydrogen atoms play an important role. Hydrogen atoms take part in the substrate binding process and are essential for proton transfer reactions during the catalysis in many enzymes. Therefore, the knowledge about the protonation states of amino acid residues in the active centre of proteins is often crucial for the understanding of their reaction mechanisms. However, hydrogen atoms, especially rather flexible ones, are barely detectable in X-ray structure determinations of proteins. On the other hand, hydrogen atoms are clearly visible in neutron crystallography experiments even at moderate resolutions (dmin < 2.5 Å).
BIODIFF is the first instrument along the cold neutron guide NL1 and is positioned in a distance of about 32.5 m from the cold source. Using a pyrolytic graphite monochromator PG(002) the diffractometer covers a tunable wavelength range of 2.4 Å to about 5.6 Å. Higher order wavelength contaminations are removed by a neutron velocity selector. The main detector of the diffractometer consists of a neutron imaging plate system in a cylindrical geometry to cover a large solid angle. A fast LiF/ZnS scintillator CCD camera is foreseen for additional detection abilities. The main advantage of this instrument is the possibility to adapt the wavelength to the size of the sample crystal’s unit cell while operating with a clean monochromatic beam that keeps the background level low.
The main field of application is the neutron structure analysis of proteins, especially the determination of hydrogen atom positions. Typical questions in this field of interest are:
Besides standard sample environment BIODIFF provides:
Primary beam
Beam properties at the sample position
Main detector
Neutron image plate (cylindrical)
Auxiliary detector
CCD camera with scintillator
Dr. Andreas Ostermann
Phone: +49 (0)89 289-14702
E-Mail: andreas.ostermann@frm2.tum.de
Dr. Tobias Schrader
Phone: +49 (0)89 289-10743
E-Mail: t.schrader@fz-juelich.de
BIODIFF
Phone: +49 (0)89 289-14565
Find the latest publications regarding BIODIFF in our publication database iMPULSE:
Heinz Maier-Leibnitz Zentrum. (2015). BIODIFF: Diffractometer for large unit cells. Journal of large-scale research facilities, 1, A2. http://dx.doi.org/10.17815/jlsrf-1-19
For citation please always include the DOI.
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