X-ray induced radiation damage drastically limits the structural information accessible in diffraction experiments from macromolecules at 3rd generation synchrotrons. Relatively little is known about the so called global radiation damage, which is responsible for the loss of crystalline order of organic and biological crystals. In a previous study we observed bond contractions in a polypeptide which could be attributed to radiation induced hydrogen abstraction. However, due to the low X-ray scattering cross section we were unable to directly observe hydrogen abstraction. We therefore propose a combined X-ray irradiation and single crystal neutron diffraction experiment of three fully deuterated model compounds to further understand this process and find out to which extent hydrogen/deuterium abstraction and subsequent geometrical rearrangements are responsible for global radiation damage