• Question: How do you think you could maybe improve your experiment could you make it more reliable or cheaper?

    Asked by to Daren on 16 Jun 2014. This question was also asked by .
    • Photo: Daren Fearon

      Daren Fearon answered on 16 Jun 2014:

      A big bottleneck in protein crystallography is finding suitable conditions for crystallising your protein. This can prove quite tricky as we don’t have good methods for predicting what conditions will be suitable. Development of high-throughput robots means that we can test many more conditions for much less money and in much less time, these robots are also more reliable. Even still, this is just making it more efficient to look at more conditions. If we could find a way to predict, or atleast narrow down, what conditions to test, we would save more time and more money.

Comments

  • Photo: Phillip

    Phillip commented on :

    Improving experimental design is a constant facet of our research. We have changed many things in our synchrotron-based imaging work in the past ten years. However, it is sometimes when a mistake in the experimental design accidentally occurs, that new discoveries are made! As we improve our designs, the experiments take less time, this in itself reduces the cost of each project. In some cases, we are able to re-route expensive experiments being run at large facilities to smaller lab-based equipment…this often drastically reduces costs and access time to larger synchrotron facilities.

    As experiments ‘evolve’ through time, we often find more efficient ways of either building or conducting the apparatus…usually with a view to increasing the reliability of our results. A fundamental goal of science is to have reliable and repeatable results.