Dear Crystallography Community: I am happy to announce the Journal of Failed Crystallization Experiments, a bimonthly publication that highlights the exciting field of failed crystallography projects and trials.
As you are all well aware, most scientific journals have been publishing crystal structures for quite some time. While crystal structures of biologically relevant proteins and protein complexes might be important, they really don't evoke the kind of broader interest as stuff like these massive sequencing efforts we have to read about in just about every other friggin' article in the big journals. [Ed.: I mean, what could be more exciting than shotgun sequencing of the lint that collects in one's belly button?] Moreover, solving crystal structures is getting so easy even grad students can do it. It's all point-and-click these days. All the real skill is in finding some way to clone homologs from every species that ever lived and getting those damn things expressed before the grant runs out--maybe one of them will diffract and then we'll have a shot at a postdoc, faculty position, or even tenure--if the global financial system doesn't collapse first, thanks to those crooks on Wall Street. To respond to this broader interest (which I only parenthetically wholeheartedly share), the owners, editors, and janitorial staff at Sell Press have decided that the crystallography community has been sitting on a mountain of tedious data since about time immemorial--or maybe a little after that, but not much. Moreover, we recognize that all of the easy structures have been solved and only the hard ones remain and these hard ones are going to take a lot of crystallization trials that will serve as fodder for hundreds of pages of supplementary information--which we will be sure to include only as jpeg attachments with the hopes that optical character recognition will catch up some day, making this supplementary information actually useful. But until then, good luck sifting through it because it would have been just as easy to include it as an excel spreadsheet or even a tab delimited text file. Don't make the mistake of thinking that we can actually use bzip or tar or could even grasp that a pdf is fundamentally different from a flat file database. You're lucky we are even competent enough to know how to download attachments from our web mail. For our first issue, we invite you to submit your most agonizing failures. A4 or letter scoring sheets, scanned at 600 dpi, will suffice for original data. We will also accept pictures of wells with oil or heavy precipitant. We have decided that clear wells represent hope for crystals some time in the future, so we can't accept pictures of clear wells except when the wells have obviously dried completely. (We relish dried wells, let me tell you--nothing screams "FAIL!" like a dry well.) We will accept pictures of crystals only if they show no diffraction or at least display irremediable diffraction pathology. Clean diffraction images will be accepted only when the author can demonstrate that their project was being scooped concomitant with data collection. Please be aware that the Journal of Failed Crystallization Experiments has a strict policy regarding data deposition. All data must be deposited in a publicly accessible database and any journal submissions must include acquisition identifiers. Moreover, despite the fact that any of dozens of software programs might serve as a reference implementation for a data format, we have decided to form a committee of mostly clueless computer specialists to design a confusing and unintelligible data standard for failed crystallization trials. Moreover, we will randomly change the format approximately once or twice per year. The deposition process will require that your data conform to our obscure standard. If it doesn't, we will advise you with senseless error messages or perhaps our servers will crash. We may even drop your connection so your browser will sit there indefinitely just not refreshing and you forgot to note the session ID before you uploaded your data. Tough luck. Start again. Oh but wait, the page isn't coming up. Restart your browser. Tough luck again. Try rebooting. Nothing. Must be our server. Try again tomorrow. To entice the community into submitting their reports, we offer the following tantalizing abstract (to be published in our first issue along with the corresponding article): ===== *The 5-HT serotonin receptor serves as the receptor for the serotonin neurotransmitter and is also the target of many pharmaceutical and psychotropic compounds. Here we show that this receptor just can't be crystallized, no matter what we do. We chopped off the N-terminus, the C-terminus, the transmembrane region, and even fused different parts together that had no business being together. Moreover, we tried just about every crystallization reagent in the book. We used PEG, lipids, salts, and extreme pH conditions. We tried hanging drops, sitting drops, batch, dialysis, sparse matrix, and incomplete factorial. We even produced monoclonal antibody. We tried to cocrystallize with every possible ligand we could imagine. I had the drug enforcement agency breathing down my back for a while because of all the crazy s**t we were trying. In conclusion, don't bother with this receptor. It ain't gonna work. Do something that's going to get results, like an enzyme or hypothetical protein from a structural genomics organism nobody cares about. ===== * Thank you for your interest in our new publication, Sincerely, Sehl Oediter Chief Guy in Charge Journal of Failed Crystallization Trials Sell Press Boston, MA
