I would be against the storage of crystals due to a number of reasons. 0) Crystal is harder to be fake than images; From crystal to images, maybe only 1 hour needed; -would be worried about: proper handling of crystals after data collection, ice formation, dropping, remounting if it another future collection is warranted, etc... 1) Protein crystals could be stored in LN2 for probably more than 1000 years; -systems and staff (cost) would need to be developed to maintain the system 2) There normally are small and not a big space occupier; -either are flash drives 3) They can be easily maintained by simply feed LN2 and controled by computer; -development of equipment, robotics and programming (cost) 4) You do not need buy hard drives, DVDs, .. and no need in suffering from different format of files, ... -disk space is cheap and becoming cheaper 5) Crystallography keeps moving forward though slow. It is possible that future people can get better data from the almost same crystal, better than using softwares to deal with images, ... -it is possible, but feel that the data being collected today is yielding reasonable conclusions when assessed correctly by the author 6) Temporarily I suggest the generous 3rd generation synchrotron facilities round out some space for saving those crystals, because there are normally located far from downtown and have enough land around... -this would take years 7) ...
Ted www.P212121.com
