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With the recent development in pulsed lasers with ultrashort pulse widths or wavelengths, spatially precise, low-damage processing by femtosecond or deep-UV laser ablation has shown promise for the production of protein single crystals suitable for X-ray crystallography. Femtosecond laser processing of supersaturated solutions can shorten the protein nucleation period or can induce nucleation at low supersaturation, which improves the crystal quality of various proteins including membrane proteins and supra-complexes. In addition to nucleation, processing of protein crystals by femtosecond or deep-UV laser ablation can produce single crystalline micro- or macro-seeds without deterioration of crystal quality. This tutorial review gives an overview of the successful application of laser ablation techniques to nucleation and seeding for the production of protein single crystals, and also describes the advantages from a physico-chemical perspective.

We found that the use of a gel solution with agarose enhanced femtosecond laser-induced nucleation and produced hen egg white lysozyme crystals at three to five times lower supersaturation than those by the femtosecond laser or agarose alone. The fast fluorescence imaging of the protein in the gel solution revealed that cavitation bubbles created high-concentration regions at the focal point, which could be the trigger for protein nucleation. The lower diffusions of protein molecules in agarose gel retained the high-concentration regions for a longer time, and facilitated the nucleation.

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