Hi, Referring to the Hb crystal that Bill Scott saw in the MRC crystal growing room (by now "tho old one" I guess), is that the one that was sitting in the largest part of the Pasteur pipette? I recall this one and I keep telling my students about it when they ask about crystal size limits.

Cheers, Boaz

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נושא: Re: [ccp4bb] largest protein crystal ever grown? 

Hi Derek,

That brings back memories.  I am pretty certain that is the myoglobin crystal that was already on Benno's shelf at Brookhaven when I went there in 1980 to collect my oxymyoglobin neutron data.  It would the metmyoglobin crystal Benno got the early neutron data from.  He just kept it on the shelf because there was, of course, no degradation in the beam and a crystal is a pretty stable way to store a protein.  Whenever he wanted more data he took it off the shelf and put it back on the beamline.  If Benno is reading this bulletin board I am sure he could tell us more.

Simon

Simon E.V. Phillips
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Rutherford Appleton Laboratory
Harwell Oxford
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-----Original Message-----
From: CCP4 bulletin board [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Derek Logan
Sent: 24 October 2013 19:08
To: ccp4bb
Subject: Re: [ccp4bb] largest protein crystal ever grown?

Hi,

Last spring I visited the Protein Crystallography Station at Los Alamos. On a shelf, in a capillary in a serious exhibition-quality glass dome, was a crystal of myoglobin some 50 mm**3, if I remember correctly. I was told it had been made by Benno Schoenborn some decades earlier and had been exposed to most of the neutron sources in the world (radiation damage - forget about it!) Paul Langan or Zoë Fisher can correct me if I've exaggerated the size or age.

Anyway, as I already lost the record several times over for having seen the biggest protein crystal ever, I can share with you the surprise and delight of having to centre the crystals using a telescope mounted on a tripod on the other side of the room. Apparently the magnification on the microscope on the diffractometer (visible in this photo, and maybe the giant crystal too? http://www.lanl.gov/_assets/php/flickrImage.php?photo_id=5033219363&secret=291f519124) was too high, so any "neutron-size" crystals would filled the whole field of view even if they were not well-centered.

FWIW, my crystals (somewhat optimistically 0.4 mm**3) didn't diffract neutrons even after a 24h exposure :-)

Derek
________________________________________________________________________
Derek Logan                                         tel: +46 46 222 1443
Associate Professor                                 mob: +46 76 8585 707
Dept. of Biochemistry and Structural Biology              www.cmps.lu.se
Centre for Molecular Protein Science           www.maxlab.lu.se/node/307
Lund University, Box 124, 221 00 Lund, Sweden

On 24 Oct 2013, at 18:35, Victor Lamzin <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

> Also following on from John's comment - back to the times of my PhD I was repeatedly growing crystals of bacterial formate dehydrogenase (80 kDa) of a size about 7x1.5x1 mm. I thought that was quite normal and did not even think of making a photo of 'just a protein crystal'.
> 
> Victor
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