Abstract
Neutron crystallography is a powerful technique to visualize experimentally the position of light atoms, including hydrogen and its isotope deuterium. Over the last several years, structural biologists have shown an increasing interest for the technique as it uniquely complements X-ray crystallographic data by revealing the position of hydrogen/deuterium atoms in macromolecules. With this regained interest, access to macromolecule neutron crystallography beam lines is becoming a limiting step. In this report we show that rapid data collection could be a valuable alternative to long data collection time when appropriate. Comparison of perdeuterated Rubredoxin structures refined against neutron data sets collected over hours and up to five days shows that rapid neutron data collection in just 14 hours is sufficient to provide the position of 262 hydrogen positions atoms without ambiguity.
