In one of my previous lives I pretended to be a crystallographer.
In other words, I would attempt to persuade concentrated protein solutions to get together and form ordered three-dimensional arrays - crystals - so that I could then shoot X-rays at them. The purpose of this was to determine their structure.
One of the things I was taught when I learned crystallography was to be very, very clean. No dust, human hair, bits of glass or other muck were allowed into the experiment. The most frustrating thing about crystallography is that all proteins are different, and will crystallize (if they crystallize) under different conditions, and there doesn't seem to be any pattern to this at all. The lab's insistence on cleanliness was an attempt to factor out one of the variables in the process. But I soon discovered that this may have been counter-productive. As with a lot of things in research, people disagreed with each other and there was a lot of intuition and opinion without a great deal of solid evidence. I realize that this might come as a surprise to some of you, to those who, perhaps, believe that 'scientists deal with facts'. The truth is that at the frontiers of science we don't know what's going on and we're trying to find out - that's why it's called 'research'. If you want facts, look in a text book (and they all contain mistakes, too).
So as I went on and got more experienced, I began to welcome small amounts of crud in my crystallization experiments. In fact, one recalcitrant protein only ever crystallized once, along what looked like an insect leg. I was never able to repeat that experiment; although I did have gothic fantasies about breeding every different sort of insect I could find and using various bodily insect parts as nucleants. A little too Shelley, perhaps.
So it's with interest that I see that Naomi Chayen's group has come up with a non-protein nucleant. It looks like they have a theoretical treatment for nucleation, and a galaxial if not universal glass-derived nucleant. This looks quite exciting, and could seriously change the way crystallographers do things. Unfortunately I'm at home right now and don't have access to the full text of the paper, so I can't comment on whether we'd actually want to buy the stuff, or even try and replicate the effect with an in-house 'mesoporous bioactive gel-glass'.
Strangely enough, the theory they've developed is for a disordered porous medium. The idea of a crystal is that it's highly ordered, for reasons that I won't bore you with here. I'm guessing that disordered means that you have a near-infinite number of different shapes in the medium, which means you've got more chance of finding the right shape you need to get that critical first nucleus. I do need to read the paper, don't I?
Oh, and in a stunning example of why you should never believe anything you read in the meeja, the sub-editor at the BBC needs a bollocking for getting Chayen's first name completely wrong. Immediately after Sear gets similar treatment for allowing the phrase 'holy grail' in the abstract. Furrfu.
