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Hi ccp4bb community, apologies for the off-topic question but I hope someone in the community may have seen something similar before. I'm fighting to optimize some needles that don't currently diffract. After coaxing them into growth large enough to see their shape, I notice they have a funny morphology (photo linked below). Apologies for the blur, the photo is at the zoom limit of our imager; the largest central rod is around 10 um wide. These "rods" make me think of the WTC One building if it were to be stacked end-on-end, or alternatively, argyle socks. http://imgur.com/5tFun Anyway, so far as I understand, this type of shape is incompatible with the growth of a single crystal, and I wonder what might cause this. They do seem to have diamond-shaped facets with edges, but I can't tell if the facets are flat or have some curvature. In similar conditions, these crystals do splinter quite a bit, and so I might guess that it is a result of some strange amalgam of 1D needles, though the pattern repeats regularly with a period of about 30 um. My two questions are: 1: What might cause this? Could this just be a fluke packing of aligned needles, some effect of lattice distortions, or something else? 2: If it's known, is there anything that might be done to coax these into a better, more "prismatic" morphology that might diffract? I'm sure the usual strategies about seeding and additives apply, but I wonder if a distorted shape like this might suggest any other avenues of attack. Thanks for your time, Shane Caldwell