Easy to Replicate
I spoke on the last day of the American Crystallography Association meeting this year in Toronto. I missed the first couple of days and, consequently, a lot of vendors. I was, however, able to get in touch with Emerald Biosystems via Twitter (@reducentropy). I was able to set up a crystal card using their new machine called the PlugMaker. I was pretty excited since this was the first time a user sample had been on the instrument.
The machine is neat to watch operate as it combines buffer with precipitant and then injects an air plug to keep each sample separate.
Ok, so this is the lead in for a crazy story.
I am driving home from Toronto when all of a sudden, I am Mr. Popular at customs.
What was the purpose of your trip to Canada?
A science meeting.
Are you bringing anything back from the meeting?
Just a protein sample. (referring to the crystal card)
What type of sample?
It was at this point that I realized my trip home was going to be longer than expected.
So what to do?
Well, I told him about the sample like a dissertation defense.
I was worried that if I didn’t tell him exactly what the sample was then I might encounter some problems down the road.
So I am in the back of this long line at customs.
All of sudden an announcement comes over the PA system, “Could the person with the biological sample please identify themselves?”
I get brought up to the front of the line and am asked again about the sample.
I, again, explain away.
Blank stare.
I realize this guy has no idea what I’m talking about and that if I don’t make this easy for him then its going to be a long night.
Should I write this down?
Sure.
The customs agent is really nice and prints me off a declaration form about the sample, which I should have had.
I am home for about 4 hours before catching a flight to visit my family in Alaska. I end up leaving my crystal card in my checked bag. So my crystallization experiment gets a couple of doses of about 35,000 ft of pressure change and near freezing temperatures.
A month later, I am on my way back from Alaska and this time, I forget the crystal card completely. So the crystal card gets the pleasure of traveling three weeks in parcel post.
This week the card arrives– and guess what?
Crystals!
enrico
September 14th, 2009 at 12:13 AM #
Wow, I wonder if and when you’ll try to reproduce those crystals! Great story by the way..
How big are those crystals? Can you loop them? Did you try to reproduce them with a different setting (ie hanging drops)?
Cheers,
E.
Sean
September 14th, 2009 at 9:05 PM #
Size: about 25 by 30 micro millimeters, hard to get the third dimension due to the plastic
Loop: have yet to try, but yeah I can loop them
Reproduce: working on it, this just happened
Samia
September 16th, 2009 at 7:40 PM #
My first thoughts upon reading this were:
1) WHOA
2) How the heck are you going to reproduce those conditions???
Amazing. Congrats on the little beauties!
Sean
September 18th, 2009 at 3:41 PM #
Samia! Great to hear from you!
Haha, my first reaction was about the same
I have some ideas about reproducing the condition – thinking sitting drop, but need to think about it some more.
One issue is how to determine the exact condition that produced the crystals (ie. what is the concentration of the precipitate?). I can estimate, but as far as I can tell there is not a way to determine it exactly so may need to do some optimization.
Peter, do you have a protocol in place for reproducing crystals from the crystal card?
Cory
September 22nd, 2009 at 10:28 AM #
Hey Sean,
I have some ideas on reproducing the crystals.
1. Determining the concentration of the precipitant is straight forward as long as you know the starting and ending conditions. In fact, since we did a slow smooth gradient, an interpolation of the precipitant concentration is very accurate.
2. For experiment style, batch-under-oil style crystallization would be the most similar to the original experiment.
3. Don’t forget that you can harvest those crystals!!! The CrystalCard has a Peel-Apart backing so you can open it up and pull the crystals out.
Sean
September 24th, 2009 at 10:46 PM #
Hello Cory,
Thanks for wonderful reply and welcome to P212121!
Also thanks again for taking the time to let me use Plug Maker at the ACA. This is the best expansion that I have had so far and have given it a pretty good effort (over 1200 conditions set up so far).
So Samia, don’t get too jealous.
Sili
January 16th, 2010 at 3:03 PM #
I recall hearing about solutions that grew neutronsource size crystals in the boot of a car – on the way back from a synchrotron.