A liquid-droplet injector has been developed that delivers pristine microcrystals to an X-ray irradiation area for conducting serial femtosecond crystallography (SFX) with an X-ray free-electron laser (XFEL). By finely tuning the pulsed liquid droplets in time and space, a high hit rate of the XFEL pulses to microcrystals in the droplets was achieved for measurements using 5 µm tetragonal lysozyme crystals, which produced 4265 indexable diffraction images in about 30 min. The structure was determined at a resolution of 2.3 Å from <0.3 mg of protein. With further improvements such as reduction of the droplet size, liquid droplets have considerable potential as a crystal carrier for SFX with low sample consumption.
Keywords: X-ray free-electron laser; liquid-droplet injector; lysozyme; serial femtosecond crystallography.