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On Thursday, November 15, 2012 09:13:58 am you wrote: > > Hi folks, > I have recently received a comment on a paper, in which referee #1 (excellent referee, btw!) commented like this: > > "crystals were vitrified rather than frozen." > > These were crystals grew in ca. 2.5 M sodium malonate, directly dip in liquid nitrogen prior to data collection at 100 K. > We stated in the methods section that crystals were "frozen in liquid nitrogen", as I always did. > > After a little googling it looks like I've always been wrong, and what we are always doing is doing is actually vitrifying the crystals. > Should I always use this statement, from now on, or are there english/physics subtleties that I'm not grasping? What we aim for is vitrification: "to make into a glass". What we achieve is another matter. Sometimes dipping into LN2 produces a partially ordered (non-glasslike) state in the solvent that is bad for our diffraction experiment. Either result, the desired glass or the unfortunately crystalline ice, is an example of freezing: "to make into a solid by removing heat". Ethan -- Ethan A Merritt Biomolecular Structure Center, K-428 Health Sciences Bldg University of Washington, Seattle 98195-7742