Comparative Analysis of Thaumatin Crystals Grown on Earth and in Microgravity

The protein thaumatin was studied as a model macromolecule for crystallization in microgravity-environment experiments conducted on two US Space Shuttle missions (USML-2 and LMS). In this investigation, we have evaluated and compared the quality of space- and earth-grown thaumatin crystals using X-ray diffraction analyses, and characterized them according to crystal size, diffraction resolution limit and mosaicity. Two different approaches for...