Matching X-ray beam and detector properties to protein crystals of different perfection

An analysis is given of the effect of different beam and detector parameters on the sharpness of recorded diffraction features for macromolecular crystals of different quality. The crystal quality parameters include crystal strain, crystal or mosaic block size and mosaic block misorientation. Calculations are given for instrument parameters such as angular resolution of the detector, beam divergence and wavelength bandpass to be matched to the intrinsic diffraction properties from these crystals with the aim of obtaining the best possible data out of each crystal. Examples are given using typical crystal imperfections obtained from the literature for both room-temperature and cryo-cooled crystals. Possible implications for the choice of X-ray source, beamline design, detector specifications, instrument set-up and data processing are discussed, together with the limitations of the approach.