Biological Small-angle Scattering - History

History

First applications date back to the late 1930s when the main principles of SAXS were developed in the fundamental work of Guinier following his studies of metallic alloys. In the first monograph on SAXS by Guinier and Fournet it was already demonstrated that the method yields not only information on the sizes and shapes of particles but also on the internal structure of disordered and partially ordered systems.

In the 1960s, the method became increasingly important in the study of biological macromolecules in solution as it allowed one to get low-resolution structural information on the overall shape and internal structure in the absence of crystals. A breakthrough in SAXS and SANS experiments came in the 1970s, thanks to the availability of synchrotron radiation and neutron sources, the latter paving the way for contrast variation by solvent exchange of H₂O for D₂O and specific deuteration methods. It was realised that scattering studies on solution provide, at a minimal investment of time and effort, useful insights into the structure of non-crystalline biochemical systems. Moreover, SAXS/SANS also made possible real time investigations of intermolecular interactions, including assembly and large-scale conformational changes in macromolecular assemblies.

The main challenge of SAS as a structural method is to extract information about the three-dimensional structure of the object from the one-dimensional experimental data. In the past, only overall particle parameters (e.g. volume, radius of gyration) of the macromolecules were directly determined from the experimental data, whereas the analysis in terms of three-dimensional models was limited to simple geometrical bodies (e.g. ellipsoids, cylinders, etc.) or was performed on an ad hoc trial-and-error basis. Electron microscopy was often used as a constraint in building consensus models. In the 1980s, progress in other structural methods led to a decline of the interest of biochemists in SAS studies, which drew structural conclusions from just a couple of overall parameters or were based on trial-and-error models.

The 1990s brought a breakthrough in SAXS/SANS data analysis methods, which opened the way for reliable ab initio modelling of macromolecular complexes, including detailed determination of shape and domain structure and application of rigid body refinement techniques. This progress was accompanied by further advances in instrumentation, allowing sub-ms time resolutions to be achieved on third generation SR sources in the studies of protein and nucleic acid folding.

In 2005, a four-year project was started. Small-Angle X-Ray scattering Initiative for EuRope (SAXIER) with the goal to combine SAXS methods with other analytical techniques and create automated software to rapidly analyse large quantities of data. The project created a unified European SAXS infrastructure, using the most advanced methods available.