Sanishvili, Ruslan wrote:
.......... Reasons for discriminating
5-10 micron beams (minibeam) from ca 1 micron (microbeam) might have
been not so much their size but what it involved to achieve these sizes.
Might I ask - do you really get data from 1 micron protein crystals? The
reduction in scattering power (==crystal volume) from 5x5x5 microns to
1x1x1 is 125 and so it seems to present a grand challenge. I had
understood there to be a more fundamental size limit, coming from
radiation damage, which is still several microns for typical proteins.
Do you suggest that ~1 micron sized crystals are no longer exclusively
in the domain of powder diffraction? Millions of crystals working
together to increase the signal does help a lot for such tiny ones :-)
Going back to the original question, with 'nano' instead of 'micro', the
FDA has defined [1] a "100 nm size-range limit of nanotechnology".
Name suggetions for 100nm - 999 nm are most welcome. Are they "submicron"?
Cheers,
Jon
[1] http://www.fda.gov/nanotechnology/regulation.html
