The advent of a high-flux and sharp X-ray beam with a small divergence makes it possible to record fiber diffraction patterns from thin filamentous specimens of muscle, collagen, silk and other systems and well-oriented sols of virus and bacterial flagellar filament. The advantage of synchrotron radiation is also useful for the data collection of the bundles of fibers that have been used in a laboratory. In this study, we collected fiber diffraction data of synthetic polyesters [poly(tetramethylene succinate)(PTMS) and poly(tetramethylene adipate)(PTMA)] and chitosan obtained from a crab tendon whose size were comparable to those in laboratory experiments (< 0.5 mm). Fiber diffraction patterns were collected at the BL40B2 of SPring-8 using an imaging plate area detector (Rigaku, R-AXIS IV++) with an X-ray wavelength of 1.0 Å. Synchrotron radiation experiments enabled us to obtain very good diffraction data with high S/N ratio and well-separated diffraction spots. In order to get sufficiently high S/N ratio we needed 3 minutes exposure. Crystal structures of PTMS, PTMA and chitosan were analyzed based on synchrotron radiation data using linked-atom least squares refinement technique. Although the resultant structures were essentially same as those analyzed with intensity data collected in our laboratory, R-values of PTMS(0.13), PTMA(0.11) and chitosan(0.11) were lower than those based on laboratory data (0.18, 0.12 and 0.16, respectively). It is suggested that exact and reliable intensities can be obtained from synchrotron radiation data even for weak diffraction spots.
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