SAXS and USAXS belong to a family of X-ray scattering techniques that are used in the characterization of materials. In the case of biological macromolecules such as proteins, the advantage of SAXS over crystallography is that a crystalline sample is not needed. Furthermore, the properties of SAXS allow investigation of conformational diversity in these molecules. Nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy methods encounter problems with macromolecules of higher molecular mass (> 30–40 kDa). However, owing to the random orientation of dissolved or partially ordered molecules, the spatial averaging leads to a loss of information in SAXS compared to crystallography.