CHROMIXS: automatic and interactive analysis of chromatography-coupled small-angle X-ray scattering data

Abstract

Summary: Size-exclusion chromatography (SEC) coupled to small-angle X-ray scattering (SAXS), also known as inline SEC-SAXS, is being increasingly used for the structural analysis of biological macromolecules, complexes and mixtures in solution. A single SEC-SAXS run generates thousands of individual SAXS profiles from the eluting solute and their analysis requires a correct identification of buffer and sample regions, a rather laborous task. We present CHROMIXS (as in CHROMatography Inline X-ray Scattering), a program for rapid reduction and analysis, both automatically and interactively, of SEC-SAXS data.

Availability and implementation: CHROMIXS is freely available to academic users as part of the ATSAS software suite (www.embl-hamburg.de/biosaxs/download.html).

Contact: apanjkovich@embl-hamburg.de or svergun@embl-hamburg.de.

Fig. 1.

CHROMIXS plot showing integrated intensities (light blue) versus time (frame number) for a SEC-SAXS run on bovine serum albumin (BSA) at EMBL P12 BioSAXS beamline. Two sample peaks (green and blue) and buffer region (red) have been predicted automatically by CHROMIXS, with the R_g values (black) estimated for the relevant regions. Bead models corresponding to ab-initio shape reconstructions based on the subtracted data are shown in green for the monomer peak and in blue for the dimer peak (Color version of this figure is available at Bioinformatics online.)