• Question: What is the most exciting/promising discovery you have made while analysing crystals? If you don't mind 'Bragg'ing!

    Asked by mcleanj02 to Ed, Susana on 27 Jun 2013. This question was also asked by loweryjames.
    • Photo: Ed Lowe

      Ed Lowe answered on 18 Jun 2013:

      Haha, I see what you did there! It’s hard to say, since some of the most difficult (and therefore satisfying) things things I’ve achieved in crystallography have not turned out to be among the most exciting structures. I think possibly when we solved the structure of the CDK9/CyclinT proteins I was particularly excited. This helps to control the production of RNA in the cell and is important both in some cancers and because the HIV virus uses it to reproduce itself – so quite a lot of people were interested to see what we had found!

    • Photo: Susana Teixeira

      Susana Teixeira answered on 27 Jun 2013:

      Lately I discovered a fairly simple way of putting the crystals in the beam of neutrons while keeping them more stable. This is likely to help other scientists that come here for their experiments. May not sound like much, but us crystallographers suffer from a constant fear of breaking or damaging our crystals! Plus a stable crystal gives better data so I am proud of it and it would please the Braggs too 😉

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