Characterization of grown-in dislocations in high-quality glucose isomerase crystals by synchrotron monochromatic-beam X-ray topography

High quality glucose isomerase (GI) single crystals are grown by using chemical cross-linked seed crystals. The crystal structure is an orthorhombic system in which the molecular arrangement is close to a body-centered cubic (bcc) one. The crystal defects, especially dislocations, in GI crystals are experimentally characterized by synchrotron monochromatic-beam X-ray topography. Two straight dislocations are clearly observed, which originate from the interface between the cross-linked seed crystal and the grown crystal. From the invisibility criterion of the dislocation images, it is experimentally identified that they are close to be of pure edge character with the Burgers vector of [1 1 1] which is typical one in bcc metal crystals. Moreover, bead-like contrasts along the dislocation images and the equal-thickness fringes, related to Pendellosung fringes, at crystal edges are clearly observed, which have never been observed in other protein crystals so far. These contrasts can attributed to the dynamical diffraction effect which has been often observed in high-quality crystals such as Si. Thus it seems that the perfection of GI crystals shown in this paper is extremely high compared with other protein crystals reported so far.