Question: Do did you come to like Crystals?? And Gryffindor All The Way :D

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  1. Hey lovescience1!

    Heheh… first I must come clean… In my heart, I know I am a Ravenclaw. I got sorted into Gryffindor on Pottermore, but I have Ravenclaw tshirts and socks and jewelry and scarves…

    I wish we had a real Sorting Hat. Are you a true Gryffindor?? Brave and loyal? 😀

    As for the *real* science, well, crystals are a bit magical!

    Proteins are very complicated. There are hundreds and hundreds of atoms in average sized proteins and to understand how they work, we need to be able to see them! Unfortunately, they’re so tiny and flexible, it’s very hard to get a good look at them.

    But we know that in crystals, hundreds of millions of molecules line up in patterns and stay (mostly) still. The best recipe for a good photograph! Everyone looking straight ahead and not jumping around.

    So we use crystals as a way of capturing our big floppy protein molecules, making them line up, and then shooting a photo (or in our case, tonnes of x-rays at them). When the x-rays bounce off all the lined up molecules, we can use computers to build a picture!

    So I became interested in them when I first wanted to see a picture of my protein. Now I have a nice little gallery of photos of proteins and I can see differences between them. : )

    Also crystals are pretty. Do you like the idea of crystallising things? 🙂

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