Good evening, Over the years I've seen great diffraction from any number of hideous brittle plates with perforated edges, 'Krypton skyscrapers', curved whiskers, 'hypodermic needles', even from crystals that looked like cat vomit (hairballs), and so forth.
The structure *ab ovo* story is my favorite, though: Similar to Debanu's case - we've had crystals (of a novel insecticidal toxin) that were perfectly egg-shaped, and every one of them was the same shape - regardless of differences in their size. I mounted them on a bet with my colleagues and we were cracking all kinds of jokes about making omelets with X-rays, and so forth - right until the very first egg diffracted better than 1.6A and produced a lovely structure. On top of this bit of weirdness, the only way these crystals could be grown was by reductive methylation followed by proteolysis. Opposite order of steps did not work, and each step in itself did not work. This story brings to mind the hellish experience of polishing small molecule crystals down to little balls in order to minimize absorption effects (great, now I made myself feel old). Artem - Cosmic Cats approve of this message On Thu, Jun 28, 2018 at 8:07 PM, Anirban Banerjee <ani...@gmail.com> wrote: > > Dear all, > > Apologies for the non-CCP4 related question. > > If you have concrete experience about visually unappealing, i.e. ugly > crystals ( your own take on ugly is fine) diffracting better than > comparably similar sized nicer looking crystals of the same protein, will > you please share here ? Even better if that led to a published structure. > Might you also have pictures ? > > We have all heard anecdotes about not using visual appearance to judge the > quality of crystals as far as their ability to give good diffraction data > is concerned but I am trying to gather some concrete pointers here to > motivate trainees. > > Thanks very much for any help. > > Best, > > Anirban > > P.S. I know that there is probably a lot of thought and wisdom on this > this specific topic but I am really looking for actual experience. > > ------------------------------ > > To unsubscribe from the CCP4BB list, click the following link: > https://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/cgi-bin/webadmin?SUBED1=CCP4BB&A=1 > ######################################################################## To unsubscribe from the CCP4BB list, click the following link: https://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/cgi-bin/webadmin?SUBED1=CCP4BB&A=1
