Protein crystallography using the rotation method and an image-intensifier-aided detector

A rotation camera has, been built for X-ray diffraction analysis of biological structures using a phosphor-image-intensifier-film combination to detect and record the X-rays. The system was tested by taking, in eight hours, a full 3 Å set of data on a single crystal of hen egg-white lysozyme. Since a sealed tube was used as the X-ray source, this is equivalent to only a one hour exposure on a modern rotating anode generator. The reproducibility and internal consistency of the measured intensities were not as good as those obtained by conventional means, but this can be accounted for by the small number of diffracted X-rays required to produce a measurable spot on the film.