On Wed, Jun 2, 2010 at 12:07 PM, Andre Ambrosio < andre.ambro...@cebime.org.br> wrote:
> We have recently obtained crystals from a small protein, and > interestingly, at least for me, they are hollow trigonal rods (please see > pictures attached). > > Just out of curiosity, has anybody ever seen such feature for protein > crystals before? > Yes, I had very similar crystals once (PDB ID 2i6f*). They were in the I4 space group, and the lattice formed two solvent channels, one large, one small, which I assumed ran the entire length of the crystal. The chains adjacent to the large solvent channel were poorly ordered and nearly uninterpretable in some datasets, so my best guess is that the hollow crystals were the result of this disorder. Fortunately, it didn't appear to have any effect on the diffraction quality. -Nat (* which still shows "To be published", 3 years after we published it - does the PDB not figure this out automatically?)
