From your picture it looks like you have both these needle clusters and single needle/rod-lke crystals. The diffraction pattern you show is what you expect from a needle cluster (with the ring-like patterns at low resolution), a single needle or a larger optimized single crystal should give you no trouble. Petri Petri Kursula, PhD ---------- Professor of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology Department of Biomedicine University of Bergen, Norway http://www.uib.no/en/persons/Petri.Kursula <http://www.uib.no/en/persons/Petri.Kursula> [log in to unmask] <mailto:[log in to unmask]> ---------- Project Leader, Docent Faculty of Biochemistry and Molecular Medicine Biocenter Oulu University of Oulu, Finland [log in to unmask] <mailto:[log in to unmask]> ---------- > On 12 Oct 2016, at 08:54, Liu Rachel <[log in to unmask]> wrote: > > > Dear everyone: > > Recently, I suffered a problem during my research work. I purified a zinc finger protein, and crystallized as a beautiful cube in a reservoir solution only containing phosphate as the precipitant, no other buffer or molecules. However, regardless of multiple optimization, the crystal diffracted badly (7~8 Å best). I have also tried co-crystallization with dsRNA because this protein can bind to dsRNA. Then crystals grow in a new condition(2.5M (NH4)2SO4,0.1M BTP, pH7.0)and its form change to cluster of needle. But the X-ray diffraction diagram is very strange(as shown in the picture). The Data cannot be processed with HKL2000 either. I want to figure out, could this be a RNA crystal rather than the complex? Or is there anybody know about the crystal of RNA molecular? > > Thank you very much! > > > Yujie Liu > Room 2071, research center in life sciences, > China Agricultural University > No. 2 yuanmingyuan west road, Haidian District, Beijing, 100193 P.R. China > Tel: (86)-10-62734078 > > <crystal.jpg><lyj.png>