I'm replying here to myself :-) So in an off-board discussion it turns out that the "microscope" in question was a special emitted light and not a UV microscope. So real UV microscopes might be better for the purpose of detecting real crystals.
Sorry for the confusion - had too much sun today :-) Jürgen On Sep 15, 2011, at 4:19 PM, Jürgen Bosch wrote: I once tested such a commercial system in Seattle about 4 years ago. It did not impress me. In particular the discrimination between salt and protein did not work for about 10 different proteins from which we already had collected data. sure those were small between 10 and 100 micrometer. Excuse was to few tryptophans So in theory it is nice but a cheaper variant might be to add Gfp to your protein and screen for something green. Jürgen ...................... Jürgen Bosch Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health Department of Biochemistry & Molecular Biology Johns Hopkins Malaria Research Institute 615 North Wolfe Street, W8708 Baltimore, MD 21205 Phone: +1-410-614-4742 Lab: +1-410-614-4894 Fax: +1-410-955-3655 http://web.mac.com/bosch_lab/ On Sep 15, 2011, at 16:03, Frank von Delft <frank.vonde...@sgc.ox.ac.uk> wrote: A while ago I was trying to be cheap, so we played around with it quite a bit in the lab. After rediscovering some of the basics of signal-to-noise and microscope transmission efficiency and that sort of rot, I realised that the commercial systems may not be all that ridiculously overpriced after all. Not if one wants to be able to say something useful about really really small crystals -- the only ones that really matter in the grand scheme of things (big ones are quick to test; little ones must first be optimized = money+time). But maybe I was just being incompetent. Happens. phx. On 15/09/2011 20:50, Andrew Purkiss-Trew wrote: Quoting "Harman, Christine"<christine.har...@fda.hhs.gov>: Hi All, I was curious if any of you have tried or even know if it is possible to adapt a stereoscope (in my case an Olympus SZX10 model) so as to view protein crystals with UV illumination. Basically, I want a cheap manual version of what a Rock UV Imager does. I know this is probably a crazy dream. However, I would greatly appreciate any comments, advice or experience any of you may have. Molecular Dimension do such an adaptor which fits to existing microscopes. See <http://www.moleculardimensions.com/shopdisplayproducts.asp?id=121&cat=X%2DtaLight%3Csup%3E%99%3C%2Fsup%3E+100+%2D+UV+for+Microscope+> ---------------------------------------------------------------- This message was sent using IMP, the Internet Messaging Program. ...................... Jürgen Bosch Johns Hopkins University Bloomberg School of Public Health Department of Biochemistry & Molecular Biology Johns Hopkins Malaria Research Institute 615 North Wolfe Street, W8708 Baltimore, MD 21205 Office: +1-410-614-4742 Lab: +1-410-614-4894 Fax: +1-410-955-2926 http://web.mac.com/bosch_lab/
