We had exactly the same thing happening with some crystals grown in tBuOH. The evaporation of tBuOH leads to currents in the drop and crystals tumbling about. Our first solution was patience and persistence, trying to trap a goodlooking crystal near the edge and loop it out. After a time however, the conditions in the drop of an opened well will have changed, making any remaining crystals lose diffraction properties. What helped was having multiple drops with crystals and growing crystals quite large. So you may have to invest a bit more time in optimising crystallisation conditions and getting a good number of drops with crystals.
A second solution was to cover the drop with a light oil. This stopped the currents and allowed looping a crystal out through the oil. This may affect diffraction quality. To know if your crystals diffract before any manipulation you might consider in-plate diffraction (possible at several synchrotrons). This would give you a baseline to judge if your crystal handling affects diffraction quality. Another, theoretical, solution would be to maintain a saturated tBuOH atmosphere just above the drop - not sure if anyone has somehow put this into practice. Mark van Raaij Dpto de Estructura de Macromoleculas, lab 20B Centro Nacional de Biotecnologia - CSIC calle Darwin 3 E-28049 Madrid, Spain tel. +34 91 585 4616 (internal 432092) > On 30 May 2024, at 13:16, 白雪慧 <zb20193020...@cau.edu.cn> wrote: > > May I ask scientific researchers, how can they retrieve diffraction data when > encountering a crystal sitting on a droplet and opening a sealed tape crystal > that keeps shaking? Crystals are grown using tert butanol as a precipitant. > As demonstrated in the video. > > To unsubscribe from the CCP4BB list, click the following link: > https://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/cgi-bin/WA-JISC.exe?SUBED1=CCP4BB&A=1 > > <e68d0e3b3c9641014e4a0975084d7754.mp4> ######################################################################## To unsubscribe from the CCP4BB list, click the following link: https://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/cgi-bin/WA-JISC.exe?SUBED1=CCP4BB&A=1 This message was issued to members of www.jiscmail.ac.uk/CCP4BB, a mailing list hosted by www.jiscmail.ac.uk, terms & conditions are available at https://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/policyandsecurity/
