• Question: What your favorite thing about crystallography?

    Asked by rhooper821 to Ben, Dave, Ed, Sam, Susana on 19 Jun 2013. This question was also asked by katieannx, chance786.
    • Photo: David Briggs

      David Briggs answered on 19 Jun 2013:

      Seeing protein structures that no human has ever seen before, and then using them to answer complex biological questions 😀

    • Photo: Susana Teixeira

      Susana Teixeira answered on 19 Jun 2013:

      It is like a roller coaster…. you start with a question, then find yourself in a lab handling litres of cultures of bacteria, then you purify and purify till you are left with a tiny amount of the sample you want (like italians and their big coffee machines that produce a tiny amount of expresso at the end…).
      You then use all of it up trying to make a tiny crystal, and take it to these huge facilities like a synchrotron, where you have a given amount of time to make it work, and cannot break your crystal. You then get your data, but that is not the end of it! You need to find the structure that matches it, and then FINALLY you can start trying to understand how the molecule works, the Eureka moment.
      It’s exciting!!!

    • Photo: Sam Horrell

      Sam Horrell answered on 19 Jun 2013:

      I really enjoy the protein purification side of crystallography. Trying to make your protein express and stay in solution can be a big task and may take many attempts over months or years but when you finally figure out how to make your protein happy it’s a very good feeling. That feeling is only beaten by seeing a crystal of your protein for the first time.

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