A novel approach for structure analysis of two-dimensional membrane protein crystals using x-ray powder diffraction data

The application of powder diffraction methods in two-dimensional crystallography is regarded as intractable because of the uncertainties associated with overlapping reflections. Here, we report an approach that resolves these ambiguities and provides reliable low-resolution phase information directly from powder diffraction data. We apply our method to the recovery of the structure of the bacteriorhodopsin (bR) molecule to a resolution of 7 angstroms using only powder diffraction data obtained from two-dimensional purple membrane (PM) crystals.