Protein crystal growth in microgravity

Abstract

A series of protein-crystal growth experiments were performed on Space Shuttle flight STS-26 in September 1988 and STS-29 in March 1989. These proteins had been studied extensively in crystal-growth experiments on earth prior to the microgravity experiments. For those proteins which produced crystals of adequate size, 3D intensity data sets with electronic area detector systems were collected. Comparisons show that the microgravity-grown crystals of these proteins are larger, display more uniform morphologies, and yield diffraction data to significantly higher resolutions. Analyses of the 3D data sets indicate that the space-grown crystals are more highly ordered at the molecular level than their earth-grown counterparts.