It is twenty years since Dr. Carsten Michaelsen at Incoatec took a close look at microfocus sealed-tube X-ray sources and realized the untapped potential of this technology. The family of IμS microfocus sources has since become synonymous with groundbreaking performance and reliability.

The most recent addition to the family is the IμS DIAMOND II which adds revolutionary high-brilliance cathode technology and electron-focusing optics to the unique diamond hybrid anode technology. This latest family of sources is now delivering X-ray beams of unprecedented intensity and stability, and is opening up opportunities to rethink what an SC-XRD experiment can be. Two new application reports demonstrate the capabilities of D8 VENTURE X-ray crystallography systems utilizing the IμS DIAMOND II X-ray source.

SC-XRD remains the only experimental method that directly determines the molecular stereochemistry of organic molecules. This method demands the most precise data acquisition and previously required long data collections. The first report shows that the IμS DIAMOND II source with state-of-the-art PHOTON III detector now enables precise data to be collected in very short measurement times.

Protein crystallography has traditionally considered only high-power sources sufficient to collect good data in a reasonable measurement time, but this came at a high cost of maintenance and downtime. The second report demonstrates that the D8 VENTURE using a Cu IμS DIAMOND II source was able to collect a complete dataset in under one minute. The data was of sufficient quality to determine a publication-quality structure to 1.8 Å. Short measurement times open up the possibility to determine many protein structures each day, as required for the protein-ligand screening campaigns that drive structure-based drug discovery in both academia and the pharmaceutical industry.

To learn more about how the new IμS DIAMOND II could drive your research, read the two reports in full here:

D8 VENTURE with IµS DIAMOND II: Fast absolute structure determination from a small organic crystal

D8 VENTURE with IµS DIAMOND II: High-quality 1.8 Å in-house protein dataset in less than a minute

APEX5 is the most widely used software suite for single crystal structure determination. It covers the entire process, from crystal mounting to CIF report. World-class algorithms ensure reliable and best-in-class results.

Apart from APEX5, there are several other scientific programs developed by the crystallographic community that specialize in addressing crystallographic problems, offering alternative approaches to crystallography. However, switching between these software packages can be challenging. The poor integration between them requires scientists to repeatedly process the same data and meticulously verify the results for any inconsistencies and errors. These tasks are tedious, error-prone, and redundant, making them time-consuming and unproductive.

As a flexible and agile crystallographic software suite, APEX5 is designed to meet the requirements of modern scientific research while catering to individual preferences. One of its key strengths is its ability to interface with a range of external crystallographic software packages.

Elements like aluminum, calcium, boron, and titanium have a high affinity to oxygen (or nitrogen). Because of this, they tend to form non-metallic inclusions; oxides or nitrides of these elements are commonly known as refractory “ceramic” materials. Such inclusions can be formed during steel production by various side reactions with the refractory layers inside the furnace, ladle, or from substances added to form the desired alloy. Since nonmetallic inclusions are insoluble in the metal melt (but also in an acid digestion for chemical analysis), they form the so-called “insoluble” fraction of an element in an alloy. This insoluble content is not distributed homogeneously inside the lattice, but represents an unwanted “defect” inside the metal phase. In other words, the amount and distribution of inclusions affects the “cleanliness” of a material: The smaller the number of inclusions, the less size they have, and the more homogeneously they are distributed, the cleaner the steel that is produced. In this Lab Report, we present an easy and fast method to determine steel cleanliness, which is well-suited for daily routine analysis and can be integrated into the normal analysis process without extra time or special conditioning.

Animal food and fodder products require stringent quality control measures throughout the production process. Testing food for its nutritional content, monitoring products for process line contamination, and analyzing the quality of the final product are just some of the many applications encountered in the food and feed industry. XRF, such as with the S6 JAGUAR Benchtop WDXRF, is a proven elemental analysis technique that is applied widely in the industry to ensure testing norms and quality standards are followed. The S6 JAGUAR enables fast, accurate elemental analysis of materials at all stages of pet food production. Joshua Minchin of New Food Magazine recently interviewed Bruker’s XRF Product Manager, Dr. Adrian Fiege, on what XRF is used for in pet food design and production.

* Original source: New Food Magazine, Volume 26, Issue 04, 30 December 2023

In X-ray powder diffraction, the basic requirement for detecting all reflections with representative intensity is the presence of a sufficient number of crystallites of appropriate size and their statistical arrangement in the sample holder. Two-dimensional diffractometry is a method to easily visualize the presence of too large or too few crystallites, or their preferred arrangement. The D6 PHASER offers two elegant realizations of 2D diffraction for reflection geometry: the Bragg-2D method and Phi-1D scans. Bragg-2D does not require the sample to be moved. Instead, a large area of the sample is exposed to the X-ray beam by choosing a wide primary divergence and the diffraction signal from different crystallites is visualized in ∆ϖ vs. 2Theta space. The Phi-1D method requires a rotating stage. The sample is illuminated with a narrower X-ray beam, the detector is positioned at a specific 2Theta peak position, and the crystallites are imaged by rotating the sample while continuously taking detector snapshots. This application report shows that 1D LYNXEYE detectors in combination with the line focus of the X-ray tube can be used efficiently to monitor the quality of sample preparation without the need for expensive 2D detectors.

The functioning of solid oral drug dosage carriers such as tablets or capsules, is highly dependent on their macroscopic and microscopic morphology, as well as the distribution of different ingredients. Morphological attributes that can be quantitatively analyzed by 3D X-ray Microscopy (XRM) include porosity, granule morphology, concentration and distribution of excipients and active pharmaceutical ingredients (API), presence of solvent or impurities, and concentration of pores. This method note presents a few examples of automated image processing workflows for segmentation and 3D analysis of the various morphological features of a Dafalgan® tablet. The methodology includes the step-by-step process to (i) delineate the volume of interest (VOI) for volume analysis, (ii) segment the coating for thickness and defect analysis, (iii) segment the air pores and the cracks for 3D separation analysis, and (iv) isolate API particles for 3D analysis, their distribution along the tablet, and individual analysis.

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