Dear All,

I am currently working on a ligand bound protein complex. From my initial crystallization screens I have identified a condition which gives me sea urchin like crystals. I managed to repeat these crystals in my optimization conditions, in fact I can see crystals in all the wells but there is no significant difference between them. All conditions give me similar size and amount of crystals. To confirm these are protein crystals or not, I tried expose the crystals to X-ray beam (in-house). Good news is that I have no obvious salt diffraction at high resolution, but the bad news is my low resolution diffractions are not really believable. In addition, these crystals seem to be quite easy to separate into needles but they are too small to tell if they do crack like most the protein crystals.

I have attached a picture of my crystals and the diffraction pattern I got at low resolution.

I am hoping if anyone can suggest me on how to improve or change the shape of these crystals if they are genuine protein crystals.

Many thanks

Kind regards

William