The best way to ascertain whether you have any meaningful crystal is diffraction. However, in the past, I have collected data from crystals that did not look "very sharp" or looked kind of oval in shape. To manage or fine tune your crystallization trials you can either try microbatch (under oil) or go for lower temp. such as 4C. I have had immense luck with microbatch method. Paraffin oil gave me best results when dealing with showers of crystals in original conditions.
See this article for using microbatch method. Control of the rate of evaporation in protein crystallization by the ‘microbatch under oil’ method-J Appl Crystallogr. 2008 October 1; 41(Pt 5): 969–971. Finally, looks are deceptive in crystallization. I have seen awesome looking big crystals with bad diffraction and vice versa. Harkewal On Dec 24, 2013, at 10:49 PM, Acoot Brett wrote: > Dear All, > > I am optimizing a crystal. In one of the optimizing conditions I find the > crystal is cubic-like shape (the crystal is not large, but absolutely not the > traditional "tiny crystal". The crystal has some kind of faces and edges but > not so sharp, and it is absolutely not round). But after 1 day the crystal > changed into sphere form (the "cubic" not obvious). > > Will you please introduce your experience on how to get the sharp face and > sharp edge crystal for my situation)? > > There is source says if the crystal grows too faster, the sharpness would be > lost. Will you please also let me know how to slow down the growth rate of > the crystal? > > Cheers, > > Acoot
