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Dear Enrico, Please don't get me wrong: what you are saying is not incorrect, but it is only half the story. On Tue, 2011-10-18 at 15:13 +0200, Enrico Stura wrote: > With improving techniques, we should always be making progress! Yes, of course! > If we are trying to answer a biological question that is really important, > we would be better off > improving the purification, the crystallization, the cryo-conditions You have left X-ray crystallography out of this list. It is a technique like the others, and can also be improved :-) It may be true that the number of crystallographers that are working on improving instrumental methodology and software is small compared to the number working on improving wet-lab techniques, but that number is not zero, and the contribution is significant. The rest of you benefit from that work! > instead of having to rely on > processing old images with new software. > > I have 10 years worth of images. I have reprocessed very few of them and > never made any > sensational progress using the new software. Poor diffraction is poor > diffraction. Maybe so, but certain types of datasets are useful for methods and software development, even if no new biological insights could be gained by reprocessing them. These datasets are often hard to get hold of in practice, especially when they are in someone's lab on a tape that no-one has a reader for any more. Obtaining protein, growing crystals and collecting new data in such a way that the interesting features of those datasets are reproduced can be much much harder than curating the images would be. This is especially true for software-oriented people like us who don't have regular access to wet-lab facilities. > Money can be better spent buying a wine cellar, storage works for wine. Images have already been lost that ought to have been kept. The questions are: how to select the datasets that are potentially of value, and how to make sure that they don't disappear. Regards, Peter. -- Peter Keller Tel.: +44 (0)1223 353033 Global Phasing Ltd., Fax.: +44 (0)1223 366889 Sheraton House, Castle Park, Cambridge CB3 0AX United Kingdom