I trying to phase a structure soaked in TaBr and am running into some technical problems. My anomalous signal goes out to about 4.5 and I have a 1.9A native data set. SIR hasn't worked so far.

Autosol SAD has given me several convincing solutions when searching for Tantalum (not TX), finding 11 sites (not clustered) at 6 angstroms: FOM =0.478, map=0.1.3, and corr of 0.82 and a final score of 37+-15.71. By only playing around with the sites I can get an overall score of 73 +- 4.58, map skew to 0.5, and a RMS density to 0.79, thought the R-factor increases to .43 and the FOM . 

Perhaps not suprisingly at this resolution, the map is uninterpretable (maybe some helices) so I'm trying to improve the phases by model building and by using Phaser and giving it TX sites. 

If I put the Ta sites in Phaser with the same dataset as Autosol, I get a FOM of .342. If I use the TX label it drops to 0.143. What is happening here? I know that typically TaBr has one or two major sites (my protein isnt massive, only about 1200 aa predicted in the ASU) , so I use only the top two major sites and have the same problem. Does this indicate that the Ta sites Autosol found are not in fact the sites I'm looking for? Or maybe that there really are 10 TaBr sites all with low occupancy? Any suggestions would be appreciated. 

Thank you. 

Best,

Ian