On 10/05/2010 04:49, Jack Reynolds wrote:
TITLE: "Extracting trends from two decades of
microgravity macromolecular crystallization history" (2005)
(Judge, Snell and van der Woerd).
"Significant enhancements in structural knowledge have
resulted from X-ray diffraction of the crystals grown . . .
in the reduced acceleration environnments of an orbiting
spacecraft."
TITLE: "Macromolecular Crystallization in Microgravity
Generated by a Superconducting Magnet" (2006) (Wakayama,
Yin, Harata, Kiyoshi, Fujiwara and Tanimoto).
"About 30% of the protein crystals grown in space
yield better X-ray diffraction data than the best crystals
grown on the earth."
TITLE: "The crystallization of biological
macromolecules under microgravity: a way to more accurate
three-dimensional structures?" (2002) (Lorber).
"The crystallization of proteins . . . in a
microgravity environment can produce crystals having lesser
defects than crystals prepared under normal gravity on
earth. Such microgravity-grown crystals can diffract X-rays
to a higher resolution and have a lower mosaic spread."
TITLE: "Protein crystal growth on board Shenzhou 3: a
concerted effort improves crystal diffraction quality and
facilitates structure determination." (2004) (Han, Cang,
Zhou, Wang, Bi, Colelesage, Delbaere, Nahoum, Shi, Zhou,
Zhue and Lin)
". . . careful and concerted planning at all stages
made it possible to obtain crystals of improved quality
compared to their ground controls for some of the proteins.
Significantly improved resolutions were obtained from
diffracted crystals of 4 proteins. A complete data set from
a space crystal of the PEP carboxykinase yielded
significantly higher resolution, and a lower average
temperature factor than the best ground-based control
crystal."
TITLE: "JAXA-GCF project - High-quality protein
crystals grown under microgravity environment for better
understand of protein structure." (2006). (Sato, Tanaka,
Inaka, Shinozaki, Yamanaka, Takahashi, Yamanaka, Hirota,
Sugiyama, Kato, Saito, Sano, Motohara, Nakamura, Kobayashi,
and Yoshitomi.)
"JAXA has developed technologies for growing, in
microgravity, high-quality protein crystals, which may
diffract up to atomic resolution, for a better understanding
of 3-dimensional rpotein structures through X-ray
diffraction experiments."
TITLE: "A Comparison between Simulations and
Experiments for Microgravity Crystal Growth in Gradient
Magnetic Fields." (2008). (Poodt, et al.).
"Microgravity protein crystal growth is expected to
lead to an improvement of protein crystal quality, compared
to crystals grown under normal gravity, due to the
suppression of buoyancy driven convection. This is highly
relevant, because for protein structure determination by
X-ray diffraction, protein crystallization is often the
quality limiting step."
TITLE: "Macromolecular crystallization in
microgravity." (2005) (Snell and Helliwell).
"Density difference fluid flows and sedimentation of
growing crystals are greatly reduced when crystallization
takes place in a reduced gravity environment."
TITLE: "Comparison of space- and ground-grown
Bi2Se.21Te2.79 thermoelectric crystals." (2010). (Zhou, et
al.)
"The compositions of the space crystal grown along
growth direction were more homogeneous than that of the
ground crystal grown. The crystallization of space crystal
grown was obviously improved."
That's just a handful of quotes from a few of the
sources I have accumulated over the last few months. I guess
this all boils down to your definition of "significantly
improved crystals."
Is there something wrong with these sources? Am I
misunderstanding their findings?
Jack
--- On Sun, 5/9/10, Dunten, Pete W.<p...@slac.stanford.edu>
wrote:
"significantly improved crystals " I
wasn't aware that was an accepted generalization,
born out
by the experiments already conducted.
Can you cite a number of cases?
Another issue for pharma would be the timeline.
Chemistry programs move pretty fast, and if the
xray
crystallographers don't keep up,
they aren't very useful.
Pete
________________________________________
From: CCP4 bulletin board [ccp...@jiscmail.ac.uk]
On Behalf Of Jack Reynolds [jdr7...@yahoo.com]
Sent: Sunday, May 09, 2010 11:26 AM
To: CCP4BB@JISCMAIL.AC.UK
Subject: [ccp4bb] Clarification and another
question . . .
--- On Sun, 5/9/10, Klaus Fütterer<k.futte...@bham.ac.uk>
wrote:
Dear Jack,
I believe your venture would enter a mature
market,
and, if
you were to offer growing growing crystals in
microgravity,
a market characterised by very high costs and
(presumably)
very low margins.
I wouldn't offer crystal growth, I would offer
access to
the data from x-ray diffraction of space-grown
crystals. Is
the data from significantly improved crystals not
a valuable
commodity?
If the pharmaceutical industry (and other
researchers, for
that matter) could grow crystals in space, and
extract
critical data from the x-ray diffraction of these
space-grown crystals (in space); AND
if costs could be reduced by 30-50%; AND
if the end-product is the data, not the crystals .
. .
do you still think (profit) margins would be
nominal?
Is your assessment of "very low margins" based on
assumed
"very high costs?"
Jack
